Laws Shelved, Lives in Limbo: Balkan Same-Sex Couples Still Waiting for Legal Recognition

If your partner collapses in a hospital in Belgrade, and you are not married, and you cannot be married — because same-sex marriage does not exist in Serbia and the law that would have granted you a life-partnership has been gathering dust on a shelf for nearly five years — you are, as far as the Serbian healthcare system is concerned, a stranger. You have no right to make medical decisions. You have no right to information. If your partner dies, you have no right to bury them; that belongs to their primary family, the one the state still considers more real than yours.

This is the reality Balkan Insight documented this week in a long, detailed piece on the legal insecurity of same-sex couples across the Western Balkans. The situation it describes is not new. What makes the report worth reading now is the weariness baked into it — the sense that five, ten, twenty years of patient advocacy have produced a set of partnership laws that exist mostly as drafts, or as promises, or as entries in EU accession documents nobody seems in a hurry to honor.

Serbia: a bill that can’t get signed

In Serbia, a law on same-sex unions was drafted in 2021 with the support of then–Prime Minister Ana Brnabić, herself openly lesbian. The bill would have granted same-sex couples most of the rights of marriage — shared property, inheritance, the right to make medical decisions, some parental recognition — without calling it marriage. It was the sort of compromise Balkan LGBTQ+ advocates have been asking for for decades.

President Aleksandar Vučić vowed to veto it, citing the constitution’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. The law was never brought to a vote. It has not been withdrawn. It simply sits, year after year, somewhere between draft and death.

In September 2024, members of the Green–Left Front introduced a new draft partnership bill to the National Assembly. The bill would establish a framework of rights and obligations for same-sex couples mirroring those of married couples in most practical respects. It has not moved. The ruling Progressive Party continues to dominate the assembly, and Vučić’s veto threat still hangs over any version that might advance.

Serbia hosted Belgrade Pride this year alongside the ongoing student protests that have shaken Vučić’s government. The Pride march made the partnership law a central demand. The government’s response was silence.

Bosnia: one entity moves, the other doesn’t

Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost comically divided on this question, as on most questions. The country’s constitutional structure splits authority between two entities — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (mostly Bosniak and Croat) and Republika Srpska (mostly Serb) — plus the Brčko District. Each makes its own family law.

In mid-2025, the Federation government began drafting a lex specialis on same-sex life partnerships, under pressure from constitutional court rulings and EU accession benchmarks. The process is ongoing. If it succeeds, same-sex couples resident in the Federation would gain most of the partnership rights their counterparts in Montenegro nominally have. It would be a significant step in a country where Pride in Sarajevo still requires enormous police presence to proceed safely.

Republika Srpska, led by the ethno-nationalist Milorad Dodik, is moving in the opposite direction. Dodik has repeatedly framed LGBTQ+ rights as a Western imposition incompatible with Serbian tradition, and a Bosnian court ruled only last week that his public statements had amounted to unlawful discrimination against LGBTI people. A parallel partnership law in Republika Srpska is not on anyone’s agenda.

The practical effect is that a same-sex couple crossing the internal entity line — say, from Sarajevo to Banja Luka — may move from partial recognition to none. And since Bosnia has no national family law, there is no federal backstop.

Montenegro: the law that’s mostly not enough

Montenegro became, in 2020, the first country in the Western Balkans to pass a life-partnership law. Six years later, that law is both a genuine achievement and, as the Balkan Insight reporting makes clear, a demonstration of how incomplete legal recognition can be in practice.

Montenegrin life partners cannot jointly adopt children. They cannot be jointly recognized as parents of a child one of them bears. The law did not amend adjacent legislation — on parental rights, on assisted reproduction, on inheritance for stepchildren — and the gaps have not been filled in the intervening years. A couple who travels to the Netherlands or Spain to have a child must come home to a Montenegrin legal system that recognizes one parent and not the other.

This is the partial recognition that advocates across the region are now being offered as the ceiling: a law that acknowledges your relationship exists without treating your family as fully equivalent to an opposite-sex family.

Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia: promises and delays

Kosovo promised LGBTQ+ civil unions as part of its 2014 civil code reform. Twelve years later, the amendment is still not on the books; the Assembly has repeatedly failed to muster the votes. Albania’s government has signaled interest in civil-union legislation as part of its EU accession process but has not tabled a bill. North Macedonia has no proposal pending.

Across the Western Balkans, then, we are looking at one country with a limited partnership law (Montenegro), one entity of one country beginning to draft a limited partnership law (Federation of Bosnia), one country where a limited partnership law has been vetoed-by-threat for five years (Serbia), and three countries where no meaningful proposal is on the table at all.

The EU accession lever — and its limits

In theory, EU accession is supposed to pull these countries toward partnership recognition. The European Commission’s progress reports regularly flag the absence of legal protection for same-sex couples. The European Parliament’s LGBTIQ+ Intergroup has urged candidate countries to act. The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that family ties formed in one member state must be recognized in others.

In practice, EU accession has proven a surprisingly weak lever. Candidate countries learn quickly which benchmarks are enforceable (rule of law, judicial independence, border management) and which are aspirational (LGBTQ+ rights, Roma inclusion, media freedom). Partnership laws fall into the second category. The message to Balkan governments has been that they will not lose accession over the absence of a partnership law, and so — with public opinion in most of these countries still skeptical and political cost high — they haven’t moved.

What the people in the limbo are doing

Many Balkan same-sex couples have simply emigrated. Advocates we spoke to in Tirana, in Belgrade, in Skopje all told the same story: the ones with means go — to Germany, to the Netherlands, to Spain, sometimes to the UK. The ones who stay organize, document, file cases, run community centers on shoestring budgets, wait for the law that was almost passed to be almost passed again.

Others are building their lives around the gap. Powers of attorney. Co-ownership of property structured through civil contract. Advance healthcare directives. Informal networks to act as family when the hospital asks who to call. It’s resourceful. It’s exhausting. It shouldn’t be the answer.

The line the Balkan Insight headline uses — laws shelved, lives in limbo — is the most precise description of the situation available. There are laws. They are not being passed. And the people whose lives those laws were meant to stabilize are doing what they can in the meantime.

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Sources: Balkan Insight reporting (April 2026); ILGA-Europe Annual Review 2026; European Commission accession progress reports; Green–Left Front draft partnership bill (September 2024); Montenegrin Life Partnership Law (2020).