The Impact of Cupriak-Trojan on the Commission LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026–2030
This post was written by Marco Pasqua (PhD, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan). It is the final contribution to the EAPIL on-line symposium on the judgment of the Court of Justice in Cupriak-Trojan. The previous posts were written by Laima Vaige, Alina Tryfonidou, Elizabeth Perry and Anna Wysocka-Bar, and can be found here, here, here and here, respectively. Readers are encouraged to participate in the discussion by commenting on the various posts in the symposium.
On 8 October 2025, the European Commission published a Communication entitled Union of Equality: LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026–2030, concerning LGBTIQ+ rights and LGBTIQ+ related actions. The document identifies three main strategic objectives.
The first, Protect, focuses on strengthening safeguards against violence and discrimination, including hate crime, hate speech, online safety and the protection of LGBTIQ+ youth. The second, Empower, aims at enabling LGBTIQ+ people to live and work freely across the EU, promoting inclusion in education, health and employment, and reinforcing anti-discrimination protection. The third objective, Engage, is about cooperation with Member States and international partners to advance LGBTIQ+ equality, support civil society and promote human rights globally.
Relevance of Cupriak-Trojan to the Commission’s Equality Strategy
The ruling of the Court of Justice in Cupriak-Trojan (C-713/23) is relevant to the above objectives in several ways and helps clarify how they may be implemented in practice.
As regards the relevant legal framework, Cupriak-Trojan further consolidates the trajectory of the Court’s case law in Coman (C-673/16), Pancharevo (C-490/20), K.S. (C-2/21) and Mirin (C-4/23). These rulings confirm that, when assessing Member State measures affecting the exercise of EU citizenship rights and family life, the central question is whether a particular action, at Member States level, amounts to an infringement of those rights derived from Articles 20-21 TFEU read together with Articles 7 and 21(1) of the Charter.
In addition, Wojewoda Mazowiecki reaffirms the direct effect of Articles 20-21 TFEU in this context, thereby ensuring that individuals can rely directly on these provisions before national authorities and courts. A further development may result from a pending case – Shipov (C-43/24) – which raises related questions and may offer additional clarification.
This line of case law reinforces the view that the Commission may legitimately prioritise measures aimed at ensuring procedural equivalence and effective administrative recognition as core elements of LGBTIQ+ equality policy. The above aspects are particularly relevant to the Empower objective, as they help ensure that individuals can meaningfully exercise their EU citizenship and free-movement rights in cross-border family situations.
Ensuring Equal Rights Across Borders: The Role of Private International Law
The policy context – namely, the Commission’s overarching approach to LGBTIQ+ equality as set out in the Communication – forms the backdrop for the section Ensuring equal rights across borders. In this part of the document, the Commission highlights the role of private international law in facilitating the continuity and recognition of family and personal status rights for LGBTIQ+ people who move within the Union.
While 22 Member States currently provide for marriage equality and/or registered partnerships, national rules on family status still differ significantly. This diversity is not, in itself, problematic. It becomes an issue when appropriate private international law mechanisms are lacking, creating uncertainty for families whose status has been validly established in one Member State but is not automatically recognised in another. According to the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights’ third LGBTIQ survey, around 14% of LGBTIQ+ parents face challenges of this type, particularly regarding the recognition of parent–child relationships.
The issues addressed in this section of the Communication – in particular, the challenges arising from the absence of adequate private international law rules – are directly affected by the Wojewoda Mazowiecki ruling. The Court of Justice clarified that the refusal to recognise or transcribe a family status already established in another Member State may amount to an unjustified restriction on free movement and an interference with the right to family life. This reinforces the need for reliable cross-border recognition mechanisms under EU law.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that these questions require balancing different considerations. In addition to free movement and fundamental rights, the EU Treaties also refer to the respect for national identities and legal traditions under Article 67 TFEU. The challenge, therefore, is not to assert the primacy of one objective and policy over all others, but to develop fair and workable solutions that operate coherently within the EU’s multi-layered constitutional structure.
This tension between EU-level guarantees and Member States’ constitutional identities has already been examined by this author in the EAPIL blog post commenting on Advocate General de la Tour’s opinion in the same case. As noted there, a convincing analysis must account not only for EU integrationist values – such as freedom of movement and non-discrimination – but also for the legitimate interests of Member States in regulating personal status according to their own constitutional traditions. EU law itself recognises that national competences remain protected, provided they are exercised without depriving EU rights of their essence.
Several Member States have entrenched definitions of marriage and parenthood at the constitutional level. Article 18 of Polish Constitution defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Hungary’s Fundamental Law, as amended in 2020, similarly states that “the mother shall be a woman, the father shall be a man”. Romanian Constitution defines the family in Article 48, and although the 2018 referendum to specify that marriage is between a man and a woman did not meet the turnout threshold, the debate reflects a deliberate constitutional stance.
Most recently, Slovakia adopted Constitutional Law No. 255/2025, amending the Constitution with provisions that emphasise national identity and sovereignty in areas such as marriage, parenthood, personal status and family life. The reform introduces new paragraphs 6 and 7 in Article 7, affirming that these matters fall within the exclusive domain of the Slovak constitutional order and cannot be delegated, limited, or interpreted as being transferable to any external authority beyond the national constitutional framework. Article 15 is amended to prohibit any agreement to create a child for another person. Article 41 is revised to state that the parents of a child are the mother (a woman) and the father (a man), and to restrict adoption primarily to married couples or, exceptionally, to single persons when in the child’s best interests. A new Article 52a further provides that Slovakia recognises only the biologically determined sex of men and women.
These examples illustrate that constitutional identity claims are not abstract arguments but concrete legal constraints that shape how Member States approach questions of family status and recognition – an issue that the Cupriak-Trojan judgment cannot disregard, even as it strengthens EU-law-based guarantees.
A more grounded point emerging from the ruling is its focus on the tangible difficulties created by divergent national practices. These include fragmented administrative approaches, obstacles in accessing social protection, difficulties in obtaining identity documents and uncertainty around property or inheritance rights. By highlighting these concrete effects, the judgment adds political and legal momentum to the Strategy’s commitments on cross-border recognition and judicial cooperation.
In its Communication, the Commission notes that several EU private international law instruments – including Regulation (EU) 2019/1111 on matrimonial and parental responsibility matters, Regulation (EC) No 4/2009 on maintenance obligations, Regulation (EU) 2016/1103 and Regulation 2016/1104 on matrimonial and partnership property regimes and Regulation (EU) No 650/2012 on succession – already ensure the mutual recognition of judgments in cross-border family situations, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity. The Commission monitors how these instruments operate in practice for LGBTIQ+ families and maintains dialogue with Member States to identify practical challenges.
The Communication’s selective examples raise a question worth noting. Regulation (EU) 606/2013 on mutual recognition of protection measures in civil matters is not included in the short list, despite its clear relevance to the Protect pillar. This omission may reflect the Communication’s focus on instruments that shape status recognition, but it also suggests a potential blind spot: distinctly procedural protection tools and their interaction with status recognition deserve explicit consideration when designing comprehensive cross-border safeguards for LGBTIQ+ families.
The Communication also reiterates the Commission’s support for the Proposal for a Regulation on parenthood. This initiative would harmonise core private international law rules and require Member States to recognise parenthood established in another Member State for its civil effects more broadly, not only when free movement is at stake. Recognition, however, would still operate within the limits and safeguards set out in the proposed Regulation itself (e.g., public policy), so it would not guarantee recognition in every possible case. Still, the instrument would markedly improve legal certainty and strengthen the protection of children’s rights across the Union.
Cupriak-Trojan also reinforces the logic underpinning these initiatives. It confirms that, where a family status has been lawfully created in one Member State, the authorities of another cannot simply disregard it in ways that undermine free movement or the right to family life. At the same time, the judgment operates within the established framework of EU private international law, which already accommodates exceptions and safeguards rather than imposing an unqualified, binary model of recognition.
Finally, the Commission notes that legal gender recognition remains uneven across Europe. While some Member States have embraced self-determination models, others still require medical interventions – a practice the European Court of Human Rights has deemed incompatible with human rights standards (Application No 55216/08, S.V. v Italy; Applications No 79885/12, 52471/13 and 52596/13, A.P., Garçon and Nicot v. France). The Commission explains that greater convergence in this area would also support the consistent functioning of EU law in cross-border situations, and it therefore intends to facilitate exchanges of best practices to encourage Member States to adopt self-determination procedures free from unnecessary medical or age-related barriers. Again, Cupriak-Trojan confirms that procedural mechanisms cannot be used to undermine substantive EU rights, highlighting that recognition must be effective and available to all without discrimination – relevant for both the Empower and Protect pillars of the Strategy.
Judicial Cooperation and Enforcement Perspective
The ruling in Cupriak-Trojan reinforces the Strategy’s attention to judicial cooperation under both Article 81 and Article 83 TFEU. While the role of Article 81 in supporting mutual recognition and cooperation in family matters has already been highlighted, the judgment signals that Article 83 TFEU – traditionally associated with combating hate crime and enhancing criminal-law responses under the Protect pillar – may also be relevant in framing EU-level responses to discrimination against LGBTIQ+ families. At the same time, instruments based on Article 81 TFEU (and proposals such as the Commission’s parenthood regulation) appear increasingly viable, both politically and legally, as tools to secure cross-border recognition of parenthood and other family-law effects without requiring Member States to alter their domestic definitions of marriage under (Empower).
From an enforcement perspective, as ‘guardian of the Treaties’, the Commission monitors Member States’ compliance with EU law and acts decisively to uphold EU values. For example, in 2022 it referred Hungary to the CJEU over discriminatory national rules affecting LGBTIQ+ people, arguing that these laws violated fundamental rights, single market rules and core EU values under Article 2 TEU (C-769/22). The case drew support from sixteen Member States and the European Parliament, and while the Advocate General issued an opinion in June 2025, the CJEU’s judgment is still pending. Cupriak-Trojan reinforces the Commission’s supervisory toolkit – infringement action, targeted guidance and structured dialogues with Member States – by clarifying the minimum baseline of recognition EU law requires, signalling to national courts and administrations the obligation to interpret or, where impossible, disapply domestic provisions that would produce the legal vacuum condemned by the CJEU (Engage).
Practical Priorities and Next Steps
The judgment of the Court of Justicealso clarifies and strengthens the Strategy’s practical priorities: it highlights the need to develop procedural tools that provide recognition and legal certainty, such as European certificates and improved mutual-recognition rules; it emphasises that monitoring and Member State action plans should focus not only on legal reforms but also on administrative practice, interoperability of registers and training of officials; it underlines the importance of linking anti-discrimination enforcement with private international law, so that equality and free-movement rights are effective in practice; and it supports targeted capacity-building in those countries where legal and administrative gaps cause the greatest obstacles for LGBTIQ+ families.
In short, Cupriak-Trojan provides judicial momentum for the Strategy, highlighting the need to complement high-level policy objectives with concrete administrative and procedural mechanisms. The Commission’s next steps should focus on translating these commitments into practical instruments and administrative tools that ensure cross-border recognition and prevent the fragmentation that the ruling highlights.