POLAND / RIGHTS AND DAILY LIFE
LGBT rights in Poland, and a country changing faster than its law
Public attitudes have shifted, foreign same-sex marriages now have a route into the civil register, and queer people are more visible than they were a decade ago. Yet Poland still has no civil partnership or any other domestic status for same-sex couples, and a presidential veto in July 2026 showed how quickly reform can stop at the final signature.
17 JULY 2026
Poland has changed and support for recognition is no longer marginal. But parliament, the presidency, Polish courts and European institutions are moving at different speeds.
The partnership law reached the president and stopped there
On 17 July 2026, President Karol Nawrocki vetoed the first national relationship-recognition package for unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, to clear both chambers of Poland’s parliament. It avoided the language of marriage and excluded adoption. Even that was too much for the president.
The veto says more about Poland’s queer reality than a rainbow-lit city centre or an international ranking can. The split between parliament and president is not constitutional theatre. It decides who counts as family in a hospital, whether a foreign marriage certificate works at home and whether a homophobic attack is recorded for what it is.
The bill was the closest Poland has come to a civil partnership. Formally titled the Act on the Status of the Closest Person in a Relationship and the Cohabitation Agreement, it would have let two adults, regardless of sex, sign a notarised agreement registered through the civil-status system. It covered medical information, burial, care allowance and survivor benefits, joint taxation, inheritance and gift-tax relief, housing, property and optional maintenance after separation. It did not create marriage equality or adoption rights.
On 29 May, the Sejm passed the main bill by 230 votes to 198, with one abstention. The Senate accepted it without amendments on 25 June. President Nawrocki vetoed both the main act and its implementing legislation on 17 July. On 17 September, the Sejm tried to override the veto. Of the 431 MPs voting, 232 backed the bill, 27 short of the 259 needed, and a second vote, on the implementing act, ended almost identically. The veto stands.
A new government did not make the state speak with one voice
The election of 15 October 2023 ended eight years of Law and Justice-led government. Donald Tusk’s coalition promised stronger protection against discrimination. In December 2024, the Ministry of Justice publicly apologised to LGBT people for the way state representatives and public media had vilified them between 2015 and 2023.
Tone matters after years in which “LGBT ideology” became a political weapon and local anti-LGBT resolutions made regions symbols of exclusion. Resolutions explicitly directed against “LGBT ideology” were later repealed or annulled by courts. But the governing coalition is not ideologically uniform.
It stretches from the left and liberal centre to the more socially conservative Polish People’s Party. Since August 2025, it has shared power with President Nawrocki, an opponent of registered partnerships. A parliamentary majority can pass equality measures. The president can block them, and overriding a veto takes a three-fifths majority in the Sejm that the coalition does not have.
A foreign marriage is taking a different route home
At the same time, the legal position of some couples married elsewhere has changed significantly.
On 25 November 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in case C-713/23 that Poland cannot refuse to recognise a marriage concluded by two Polish citizens of the same sex in another EU member state after they exercised free-movement rights. Where transcription into the Polish civil register is the only effective recognition, EU law requires it.
Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court applied that judgment on 20 March 2026, ordering Warsaw’s civil registry to transcribe a marriage concluded in Germany. Three further judgments on 7 May followed the same direction.
The government then changed the civil-status forms to accommodate foreign same-sex marriage certificates. The regulation was published on 22 May. On 28 July, the Constitutional Tribunal, a body whose legitimacy the government does not accept, declared the new forms unconstitutional; Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski replied that 184 such marriages had already been transcribed and that the work would continue. The regulation took effect on 23 August 2026. Copies of transcribed marriage certificates now come in three versions, for a woman and a man, two women or two men, while the form for marriages concluded in Poland is unchanged.
This is not marriage equality by another name: two men cannot marry in Poland. The route concerns a status acquired abroad, especially through EU free movement. A couple with an eligible foreign marriage may gain documentary recognition; a couple who built the same life entirely in Poland cannot register it.
Courts moved the boundary, not the whole system
In Przybyszewska and Others v. Poland, decided on 12 December 2023, the European Court of Human Rights held that Poland had violated the right to private and family life by failing to provide a framework for same-sex couples. Later judgments reinforced that finding.
The Committee of Ministers has continued to supervise the execution of the judgments. The vetoed package was the government’s main answer, and its failure leaves the central problem unresolved: foreign-marriage recognition helps one group but supplies no general domestic framework.
Courts can enforce a right in a particular setting. They cannot write a complete family-law settlement.
The motive can still disappear from the case
Poland’s Criminal Code does not explicitly list sexual orientation or gender identity in its principal provisions on hate-motivated violence and speech. Assault and threats can be prosecuted, while European human-rights law requires investigation of a possible discriminatory motive. The omission still has consequences.
In Bednarek and Others v. Poland, delivered on 10 July 2025, Strasbourg examined an attack on men in Warsaw after two held hands. Polish courts convicted the attackers, but the homophobic hostility was not reflected in the charges or punishment. The state had failed to respond adequately to the motive.
Parliament tried to close part of the gap in March 2025 by adding sexual orientation to several provisions. The Constitutional Tribunal ruled the amendment unconstitutional on 30 September 2025, and it never entered into force. As of 29 July 2026, no replacement covering both sexual orientation and gender identity is in effect.
The result is a familiar form of partial protection: the violent act may be punishable, but the prejudice that shaped it is harder to make legally visible.
A less hostile route still runs through the courts
One clear procedural improvement came from the Supreme Court. On 4 March 2025, its full Civil Chamber abandoned the practice requiring a trans person to sue their parents to correct the sex marker on a birth certificate.
Such cases should instead use a non-contentious application. The person concerned is the applicant; only a spouse may also participate. This removes an artificial conflict with parents.
It is not administrative self-declaration. Poland has no comprehensive statute, and recognition still depends on courts whose evidentiary practice can vary. The route is more dignified, but not uniform or self-determined.
Acceptance is rising, but caution is still the norm
Public opinion has moved faster than legislation. In a representative July 2024 CBOS survey, 52 per cent supported same-sex civil partnerships and 43 per cent opposed them, the first time support had led in that series. A separate August survey put support for same-sex marriage at 44 per cent, up ten points since 2021, and found that 47 per cent personally knew a gay or lesbian person.
Those numbers describe a society becoming more familiar with queer lives. They do not mean that visibility feels equally safe.
The EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s 2024 Poland factsheet found that 72 per cent of respondents often or always avoided holding hands with a same-sex partner; 40 per cent avoided certain places for fear of assault. Only 34 per cent were fairly or very open about their identity. In the previous year, 44 per cent had experienced discrimination and 58 per cent harassment. Only eight per cent of those attacked reported it to the police.
Greater acceptance and continued caution can coexist. A person may be open with friends and guarded at work, relaxed in one neighbourhood and alert on the train home. Legal rights are national; the social temperature is local and situational.
Poland is moving, but it is not settled
The shorthand that Poland is frozen in the previous decade is no longer accurate. Parliament has voted for recognition, the highest administrative court has ordered a foreign same-sex marriage transcribed, and the Supreme Court has removed the requirement for trans people to sue their parents.
But equality has not arrived. The veto, which the Sejm failed to overturn in September, left couples without a civil partnership or any other domestic status. Hate-crime provisions still omit sexual orientation and gender identity, and many queer people continue to manage visibility as a safety decision.
Poland’s direction of travel is visible, but every route has a checkpoint. The question is whether institutions can turn change into rights that survive the next veto, court case and election.
Change is visible. Equal protection is not complete.
The courts, parliament, presidency and public are no longer moving in one direction. That institutional split shapes everyday life more than any simple label applied to the country.
