Strasbourg condemns Spain for denying widow’s pension to unmarried couples

The court in Strasbourg condemned Spain today for denying four Catalan women a widow’s pension, after the death of those who had been their extramarital partners for years. The plaintiffs were hit by a constitutional penalty that altered the coverage afforded them by Catalan civil law.

In their opinion, the European judges point out that four women (Montserrat del Pino Ortiz, María Ángeles Bollas Angulo, Margarita Mérida Molero and Lidia Ribe Pérez) respected the rules required by Catalan civil law to receive that pension, until the decision of the Constitutional Court of April 10, 2014, and since then they have been unprotected.

The reason for this is that those who were their common-law partners died less than two years after the application of that decision, according to which common-law partners in all autonomous communities had to be officially registered as such for at least that long to be able to exercise the right to a widow’s pension.

In practice, The Constitutional Court “introduced a new legal requirement that objectively the prosecutors could not fulfill”. None of them went through the formalities to apply, but even if they had, they would not have received a pension.

This means “They were affected by the lack of transitional measures” that they had to be enabled after the constitutional penalty, a deficiency that had already led to a condemnation from Spain for European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

The ECHR ruling does not automatically mean that the four women will receive compensation for the pensions they did not receive, but it reminds that Spanish domestic law provides the possibility that there will now be a revision of the initial rejection they gave them.

In any case, it establishes that Spain will have to pay moral damages 8,000 euros to Montserrat del Pino and 6,000 euros to Margarita Mérida and Lidia Ribe.

The origin of the case is that the Catalan Civil Code provided for the payment of widow’s pensions to the survivors of unmarried couples who had lived together for at least five years, even if they had not been formalized in a public register or a notarial deed.

The problem is that this registration at least two years before the death of one of the members of the couple was necessary in autonomous communities that do not have their own civil law, and the Constitutional Court in its already known judgment of April 10, 2014 considered that these differences imply a violation of the Magna Carta.