Supreme Court of Panama determines that the ban on same-sex marriage is not unconstitutional

Men climb a light pole with a Panama flag during a protest against marriage equality.

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(Credit: LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images)

(CNN Spanish) ––

The Plenary of the Supreme Court of Panama declared that an article of the Family Code that prohibits marriage between people of the same sex is not unconstitutional.

The country's highest court reported this Wednesday in a statement on the ruling that endorses the constitutionality of article 26 of the Family Code, which establishes that marriage must be "between a man and a woman."

In its ruling, the Court also affirmed that a provision of the Code of Private International Law of the Republic, which "prohibits marriage between individuals of the same sex," is not unconstitutional.

Based on the presentation by Judge María Eugenia López Arias, the plenary session of the Court determined that the norms that stipulate that marriage is something that a man and a woman must agree on and at the same time prohibit the marriage of persons of the same sex " They are objectively and reasonably justified in the general interest of giving precedence to those unions with the potential to establish families, give continuity to the human species and, therefore, to society”.

"Until now, the right to equal marriage is no more than an aspiration that, although legitimate for the groups involved, does not have the category of human right or fundamental right, since it lacks conventional and constitutional recognition," he highlights among his reasonings of the judicial body in the official document.

For his part, Carlos Ernesto González, one of the lawyers demanding the revision of the norm, told CNN that the Court is ignorant of human rights, and that this issue has already been exposed to the Inter-American Commission on DD. H H.

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Elizabeth González contributed to this report.

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