A same-sex couple are suing authorities in Slovakia for refusing to register their Austrian marriage, testing whether a landmark EU court ruling can turn recognition abroad into legal security at home.
Their fight exposes a clash between European obligations and national restrictions – and what that means for LGBTQ+ people living under Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government.
Ivan Novotný, 31, and Metod Špaček, 51, married in Austria in 2020, but six years on, their marital status at home remains unrecognised.
There is no same-sex marriage in Slovakia, a socially conservative, predominantly Catholic country; neither is there any form of civil partnership.
But Novotný and Špaček, who are both lawyers and former diplomats, are not asking for that. They want the Slovakian authorities to recognise a marriage that was concluded legally in another EU country – something the bloc’s top court has said is mandatory for all EU members.
“I’ve said this publicly several times, and [LGBTQ+] activists in Slovakia have criticised me for it: Metod and I are not discriminated against here. We have a lovely life here in Bratislava, in Slovakia,” Novotný said. “So, we don’t actually need [recognition of marriage] for our day-to-day lives.”
For example, said Novotný, when Špaček was hospitalised during the Covid pandemic he was treated by a “lovely” doctor who recognised Novotný’s official relationship to her patient.
He added: “She put me down on the report as ‘husband’ and gave me all your [Špaček] medical information. The problem is: that was because she was nice, not because she had to do it. If someone wanted to make trouble for us, they could do it.
“That’s not how the rule of law should work.”
The couple argue they are on solid legal ground after a ruling by the EU’s highest court in November 2025 in response to a case brought by a Polish same-sex couple who had married in Berlin.
Jakub Cupriak-Trojan and Mateusz Trojan had challenged the Mazovia provincial governor’s refusal to recognise their German marriage. The court ruled that member states must recognise such marriages where couples had exercised their right to move and reside in another EU country, and created or strengthened family life there.
The European court of justice ruling does not require member states to allow same-sex weddings at home.
The Slovakian authorities explained why Novotný and Špaček’s request to register their Austrian marriage had been turned down in a letter signed by the interior minister, Matúš Šutaj Eštok.
“[The letter] says that since the constitutional definition of marriage [in Slovakia] is a bond between a man and a woman, they lack the legal basis for formally recognising the marriage certificate. That’s essentially it,” said Špaček, who served as chief of staff to the country’s liberal former president Zuzana Čaputová.
Across town, in the house his grandparents built on a hill overlooking the Danube, Marián Žáry Kukelka, 44, recalled his wedding to his partner, Ondrej, in 2023. The couple married in Hainburg an der Donau, an Austrian town visible from their terrace.
Žáry Kukelka, a radio presenter for the public broadcaster STVR, is also suing Slovakian authorities. He uses his full married name on air (Žáry is Ondrej’s surname) and is supported by his colleagues. But his official documents refer to him as Marián Kukelka. He said: “It’s a court case for love. I don’t need that surname to live my life, but for me it’s a kind of tribute to my partner, that I can carry his surname too.”.
Žáry Kukelka lives behind Bratislava Castle, not far from Zámocká street – the scene of the homophobic attack in 2022 where two people were shot dead outside the LGBTQ+ bar Tepláreň.
The anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric of many Slovakian politicians, especially in the government, was contributing to an atmosphere of increasing hostility, he said.
Last year, Fico’s government backed constitutional changes recognising only two sexes and tightening adoption restrictions. Žáry Kukelka told the Guardian that Hainburg an der Donau had been “overwhelmed” with LGBTQ+ couples from Slovakia wanting to get married since a change to Austrian legislation made it possible.
He himself had experienced little in the way of abuse as a gay man, he said, although he admitted he thought carefully before using the words “my husband”, depending on whom he was talking to.
“Two weeks ago, we were in Switzerland, and there we held hands in public for the first time in a long time,” he said. “We felt it was different there.”
Slovakia’s interior ministry said it was bound by the country’s existing constitutional and legal framework, regardless of whether a marriage was valid abroad.
It acknowledged the primacy of EU law but argued that recognition for freedom of movement purposes did not require registration as a marriage. Its administrative work “cannot replace decisions by the legislature or the constitutional legislature,” the ministry told the Guardian.
