Same-sex marriage in South Africa

Same-sex marriage has been legal in South Africa since the Civil Union Act came into force on 30 November 2006. The decision of the Constitutional Court in the case of Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie on 1 December 2005 extended the common-law definition of marriage to include same-sex spouses—as the Constitution of South Africa guarantees equal protection before the law to all citizens regardless of sexual orientation—and gave Parliament one year to rectify the inequality in the marriage statutes. On 14 November 2006, the National Assembly passed a law allowing same-sex couples to legally marry 230 to 41, which was subsequently approved by the National Council of Provinces on 28 November in a 36 to 11 vote, and the law came into effect two days later.

South Africa was the fifth country, the first (and only, as of February 2017^[update]) in Africa, the first in the southern hemisphere, the first republic, and the second outside Europe to legalise same-sex marriage.

South Africa was the first country in the world to safeguard sexual orientation as a human right in its constitution. Both the Interim Constitution, which came into force on 27 April 1994, and the final Constitution, which replaced it on 4 February 1997, forbid discrimination on the basis of sex, gender or sexual orientation. These equality rights formed the basis for a series of court decisions granting specific rights to couples in long-term same-sex relationships:

In 2002 a lesbian couple, Marié Fourie and Cecelia Bonthuys, with the support of the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, launched an application in the Pretoria High Court to have their union recognised and recorded by the Department of Home Affairs as a valid marriage. Judge Pierre Roux dismissed the application on 18 October 2002, on the technical basis that they had not properly attacked the constitutionality of the definition of marriage or the Marriage Act, 1961.

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