Elisa Mari, Pitt Law '10, files from Athens:

Tuesday morning at 7:30 am, Tasos Aliferis, the Mayor of Tilos – a small Greek island in the eastern Aegean – formally married two homosexual couples. The first couple to get married at dawn were gay, the second couple was lesbian. The whole ceremony happened without any publicity or debate preceding the event, but now all of Greece is debating the social and legal issues surrounding the marriages.

The Greek Ministry of Justice was quick to condemn the marriages as legally baseless. Many lawyers and lay people view the marriages as a sham and say that the Mayor and the couples who got married were just playing theater.

The public prosecutor of the Areos Pagos, the Supreme Court of Greece, has ordered the Mayor not to officially register the marriage certificates with the competent authority, stating that there is no legal base to support same-sex marriage. In addition, the Minister of Justice has said as far as the State is concerned, attempts at civil (i.e. non-religious) marriages between homosexuals are illegal and these specific "marriages" have no valid base in Greek law.

On Wednesday, the Mayor was called to give an account before the court of Rhodes for his actions and is now facing charges for failure to perform his duty as mayor (at the hearing on Wednesday, the court decided not to hear the Mayor's case at that moment, and kept him waiting as they are still reviewing his case). As the Mayor of Athens commented, it is not a mayor's role to make law, or state what the law is – his role is simply to enforce the existing law. But the Mayor of Tilos has refused to take back the marriage certificates, stating that by performing the wedding ceremonies, he was merely upholding the law, the Greek Constitution as well as the Charter of the UN.

The Greek Constitution itself defines marriage to be between two individuals, and makes no specification that the union requires a man and a woman to be legal. Greek family law, which is similarly codified, also fails to mention same-sex marriage while prohibiting marriages between individuals of vertical relationship, i.e. direct descendants, and horizontal relation, i.e. siblings and cousins up to the fourth degree.

Lawyers debating the issue in the newspapers and on television are making the argument that the marriages are groundless because even if the Constitution and the Civil Code do not specifically prohibit same-sex marriage, at the time the law were written as well as today, it is generally understood in society that by definition marriage is obviously only for a man and a woman. Therefore the fact that there is no specific prohibition of homosexual marriage does not make that legal.

Those in favor of same-sex marriage view these marriages – legal or illegal as still to be determined – as a big step for gay and lesbian rights in Greece. Those opposed are confident that these marriages will be declared illegal and seen as isolated events in which the Mayor of Tilos overstepped his authority. In the end, it will be up to the courts to decide. And this is only the beginning of the issue. The next big question on everyone's mind is if homosexual couples are given the right to marry, will they also have the right to adopt children?

As for the Greek lawyers that I work with, the general consensus is that there doesn't seem to be any legal barrier in the Constitution or the Civil Code that would prohibit same-sex marriage in Greece. In addition, as they jokingly add, they are in favor of same-sex marriage if for no other reason than more marriages means an increase in inheritance issues and an eventual increase in divorces, which after all is good for business!