The Andorran Government intends to eliminate the "terminological" difference between civil marriage between persons of the opposite sex and civil union between persons of the same sex. This is contemplated in the proposal for a law on the person and the family, which have been presented in recent days by representatives of the three parties that make up the Andorran government.

The Consell General (unicameral Parliament of the Principality of Andorra) approved in November 2014 the law that made civil unions between people of the same sex possible and granted them the same rights as those of marriages, including joint adoption (although in its At the time, Andorran LGTBI activists warned of the existence of some gaps due to the terminological difference). Now, more than six years later, the Andorran government has decided to go one step further and suppress this difference. This is determined by the draft of the proposition of law of the person and the family, which on March 10 presented at a joint press conference Ester Molné (representative in the Consell General of Democrats for Andorra), Sílv i a Ferrer (de Liberals d'Andorra) and Carles Naud i (from Ciutadans Compromesos). These are the three parties that make up the current Andorran government.

As Molné, Ferrar and Naudi have explained, the future law of the person and the family updates in a single text different previous laws that have to do with the family institution, introducing various reforms such as, to mention another example, the suppression of the obligation to go through a separation as a preliminary phase before finally granting the divorce. In this context, the name of civil unions between people of the same sex is updated, without this meaning any change in the rights and obligations of those who contract it, which will become the same as that of civil marriages between people of different sex. In short, there will be a single civil institution, regardless of the sex of the parties.

Of course, the reform uses a linguistic "trick", at least according to the statements of the aforementioned political representatives ( you can see here the press conference they gave , in Catalan). And, unless there are changes during its parliamentary procedure, the law will use the term "casament" for the institution of civil marriage, while it will reserve the term "matrimoni" for religious canonical marriage. A difference that (so it seems to us) seems especially thought so that the reform does not raise the wrath of the Catholic Church. It should be remembered, at this point, that one of the two co-princes of Andorra (along with the President of the French Republic) is the Bishop of La Seu d'Urgell, who is not likely to be very happy with the reform. However, today Andorra is a constitutional democracy in which the role of the co-princes is very limited. Thus, the current Andorran Constitution provides mechanisms for some laws to come into force despite being sanctioned by a single co-prince.

Filiation and surrogacy

Another reform proposed by the law proposal, according to Diari d'Andorra , is the recognition of filiation in the case of children born through surrogacy in countries where this procedure is legal. Andorra, like its neighbors Spain or France, does not allow surrogacy in its territory, but the Andorran justice has recognized affiliation in several cases in this situation (in line with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights ). If the proposal is maintained during the parliamentary process, the future law will explicitly recognize this possibility. Read more via dos manzanas