Same-sex life partners Ivo Segota and Mladen Kozic filed a private motion for the assessment of the constitutionality of the Foster Care Act, having already sued the state at the Administrative Court, due to discrimination based on sexual orientation in the issue of fostering permits.

Two same-sex life partners filed a motion on Wednesday to Croatia’s Constitutional Court disputing the legality of the recently passed foster care bill, claiming that the new law’s provisions are discriminating.

Ivo Segota and Mladen Kozic – a molecular biologist and a sociologist, aged 36 and 38 – married in 2015 and then applied at their local social welfare centre to adopt a child and become foster parents.

“We underwent everything other couples go through, every psychological test, as well as the interviews. The process is long and exhaustive. Although we were initially told that we meet all the requirements for foster parents, the social welfare centre and the Family Ministry later refused to issue a fostering licence to us, because we are a same-sex couple in a registered life partnership,” Segota told reporters on Wednesday.

Segota and Kozic then filed a lawsuit at the Administrative Court, and on Tuesday they also filed a motion asking Constitutional Court to rule whether the law is in line with the Constitution. Segota and Kozic said that the law as it stands “forgot” to include same-sex partnerships in the wording which defines who can qualify for foster parenting.

By excluding same-sex couples, the law is in breach of many other Croatian laws, Segota and Kozic said, as individually as homosexuals they are legally allowed to be foster parents, but not when applying for it together, as members of a same-sex partnership.

“We’d like to emphasise that the new law is good, and it offers good solutions, which will certainly improve the foster care system in Croatia. However, the article which excludes life partners from applying for parenting is dubious, so we’re now asking the Constitutional Court to say its position on this,” said Segota.

He said that there are already many same-sex partnerships with children, and that they do not experience any major problems and aren’t being stigmatised.

“It’s not our goal to knock down the law but help the government to improve it. We regret the fact that the government, the Parliament, and the President – whether on purpose or not – seem to consider same-sex partnerships as second-class families,” added Kozic.

He said that there are currently 22 European countries which recognise same-sex partnerships as equal to traditional families before the law, and allow them foster parenting, including some other traditionally Catholic nations such as Spain or Portugal.

The foster care law, passed by parliament in December, caused controversy for excluding same-sex couples from the wording which defines who can apply to become foster parents, in spite of opposition from the liberal HNS party, a junior member of the ruling coalition led by the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

Earlier this month, Rainbow Families, a group which promotes rights of same-sex parents, had also filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court, announcing that if the court supports the law as it is today, same-sex couples would go on to file individual lawsuits against Croatia at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

The bill was mainly intended to attract more people to foster parenting, in order to tackle the problem of having only 1,300 registered licensed adopters in a country which has some 3,000 children housed in group homes waiting for adoption.

The debate over whether same-sex couples should be included in its provisions led more than 200 psychologists, social workers, and educators to send an open letter to the media debunking claims by conservative groups that children raised by same-sex partners end up in any way being worse off than those who had grown up in homes with traditional family units.

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