El Salvador’s Supreme Court sided with the LGBTQ community.
The El Salvador Supreme Court has blocked a measure that would have banned same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court claims that the measure was voted on too hastily to allow public debate on the issue, according to The Associated Press. The Legislative Assembly voted in favor of the measure in April 2015 but the decision by the Supreme Court blocked legislators from ratifying the ban. The same legislation would have also legally defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman, and aimed to bar same-sex couple from adopting children. It would have required 56 of the 84 legislators to ratify the measure, as reported in The Associated Press.
El Salvador is one of 16 countries that were ordered to legalize same-sex marriages by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Twenty countries agreed to follow the court’s rulings when they voted to be part of an association of states. Sixteen of them still do not recognize same-sex marriage. Those countries include Peru, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. The IACHR ruled on a petition that was filed by Costa Rica’s president asking for the court to allow same-sex marriage in the region. The court ruled on Jan. 10 that all the countries under the jurisdiction of the court must legalize and allow same-sex marriages.
According to The Economist, the court, which is based in San Jose, Costa Rica, was first established in the 1970s to rule on human rights cases. Over time, the court has become something of a supreme court on human rights in Latin America.
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