Australian laws barring same-sex couples who married overseas from being able to get a divorce are in violation of international human rights law, a United Nations committee has declared.



In a decision handed down in March and published on August 3, the UN Human Rights Committee found in favour of Australian university lecturer Dr Fiona Kumari Campbell, who married a woman in Canada in 2004 but has been unable to get divorced since the couple split up about 13 years ago.

The ruling is a significant one for Australia, where a robust debate on same-sex marriage continues to rage among politicians, against the backdrop of clear majority support for same-sex marriage in the community.

As same-sex marriage is not legal in Australia, Campbell's 2004 marriage is not officially recognised as a marriage and therefore can't be subject to Australian divorce proceedings. But in order to get a divorce in Canada, you have to have lived there for a year.



Several Australian same-sex couples have been left unable to divorce after marrying in New Zealand, Canada, and the UK.

The UN committee found that Australia's laws banning foreign same-sex marriages from being recognised mean Campbell has no mechanism by which to get a divorce.

It rejected Australia's argument as to why some foreign marriages were recognised for the purposes of divorce and why same-sex ones were not as "not persuasive".

"In the absence of more convincing explanations from the State party, the Committee considers that the differentiation of treatment based on her sexual orientation to which the author is subjected regarding access to divorce proceedings is not based on reasonable and objective criteria and therefore constitutes discrimination under article 26 of the [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights]," the decision read.

Three people on the 17-person committee wrote dissenting reports.