Is the law an ass - or just a mule?

So what has the campaign been up to lately? Everything seems to have gone quiet.

Well, we've been very busy behind the scenes, but since the matter in hand is an attempt to elicit information from the government, visible progress was always going to be slow to appear.

Essentially, we've been trying to resolve the question of how the law will treat opposite-sex couples who contract valid civil partnerships overseas. Increasingly, countries in all parts of the world are introducing some form of partnership contract that is available to same-sex and, in many cases, opposite-sex couples. However, the international recognition of these contracts is patchy (unlike the near-universal recognition of any opposite-sex partnership that happens to be called a marriage), and this has the potential to cause serious anomalies for couples who form partnerships abroad or change their country of domicile.

Currently, non-resident opposite-sex couples are able to form a civil partnership with all the legal force of marriage in New Zealand, and the Netherlands have opposite-sex civil partnership for residents. (The French 'civil pact' is not the legal equivalent of marriage.)

Under current law, same-sex couples who contract a recognised marriage or civil partnership abroad are treated in the UK as having formed a civil partnership, and gain all the concomitant legal rights, privileges and responsibilities. Likewise, opposite-sex couples who form a recognised marriage abroad are treated in the UK as being married. However, the law appears to be utterly silent on the treatment of opposite-sex couples who form a civil partnership abroad.

We know from the failure of Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger's case (blogs passim) that an opposite-sex civil partnership contracted abroad would not be deemed to be a civil partnership in the UK. The Civil Partnership Act explicitly restricts civil partnership to same-sex couples. However, no-one knows whether such a civil partnership would be treated as a legal marriage or treated as void.

This grey area clearly needs to be resolved to avoid the anomalies that will inevitably arise when opposite-sex civil partners return to or settle in the UK. Will their wills still be valid? How will they be treated under family law or for inheritance tax purposes?

Nor is this an abstract question postulating hypothetical immigration: if the UK government continues to exclude opposite-sex couples from forming civil partnerships in the UK, many couples are likely to travel abroad in order to formalise their partnerships conscientiously - they need to know what their legal status will be on their return.

So far, we have put this question to the General Register Office, who pronounced themselves unable to judge and referred us to the Attorney General's Office. They denied responsibility for the issue, and referred us to the Department for Constitutional Affairs, who have thus far not deigned to respond.

Needless to say, we will keep asking. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who has recently signed the petition and volunteered to help spread the word of the campaign.