MOSCOW, August 1 (RIA Novosti) – A same-sex couple on Thursday asked a Moscow court to overturn as illegal a refusal by St. Petersburg authorities to register them as married, a court spokeswoman told the RAPSI legal news agency.
On June 28, Yana Petrova and Yelena Davydova applied at a St. Petersburg registry office but were denied on grounds that according to Russia’s Family Code marriage is a conjugal union between man and woman.
In a statement, the couple requested the court to reverse the St. Petersburg agency’s decision and “order it to register their marriage,” court spokeswoman Maria Balakshina said, adding that the couple had addressed the Moscow court because they were Muscovites.
Last week, a similar complaint was lodged in central Russia’s Lipetsk Region by two gay-rights activists, Dmitry Chunosov and Yaroslav Yevtushenko, who were also denied marriage registration.
In a statement, the activists asserted that the Family Code contains an exhaustive enumeration of grounds for refusing marriage registration but does not mention same-sex couples.
