The Right to Marriage according to the Provisions of the Main Legal Instruments of the UN and EU

Abstract

Both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 16) and in the European Convention on Human Rights (Art. 12), the right to marriage is perceived and defined as a fundamental human right, as it was in fact enounced both by jus divinum and by jus naturale. Among other things, from the texts of the legal instruments, of prime importance to the nations of the world, one can note that a marriage can be concluded only between a man and a woman, and only if the following indispensable conditions are met, namely: a) the marriageable age laid down in the national law; b) the mutual consent of the future spouses; c) that the race, nationality or religion of the future spouses are not taken into account. Therefore, a valid marriage is concluded only by the persons of different sex (man and woman), and not by the people of any sex, as the Treaty of Nice (2000) stipulated. In the article, we also highlighted the fact that the right of a man and a woman to have a family is ontologically bound with the marriage. This reality proves in fact, once more, that the marriage and the family were and remain “two main institutions of the mankind.”