On 14 November 2013 a group of 108 Lithuanian MPs registered a Constitutional amendment, which would redefine a constitutionally protected concept of ‘family life’ as emanating from a traditional marriage by a man and a woman and/or from motherhood and fatherhood. This is the second time as the Lithuanian Parliament seeks to amend the Constitution accordingly. In June, 2012 the analogous amendment failed only by one vote, receiving 93 instead of 94 required votes in the Parliament. This time the amendment was proposed by the MP Rimantas Jonas Dagys from the Homeland Union and the MP Rima Baškienė, belonging to the group of non-attached Members in the Parliament.

In 2011 the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania announced that defining families as strictly based on marriage is contradictory to the Constitution of the Republic. The current version of the Article 38 of the Constitution states that family is the foundation of the society and the State, but there is no direct definition of what constitutes the concept of family.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on numerous occasions has expressed its opinion that family relations shall not be based only on marriage, but also on shared, permanent and stable life and mutual obligations. In the recent case of Vallianatos v. Greece the Court has explicitly pointed towards the legal regulations in Lithuania, allowing registered partnerships only for different-sex couples, as allegedly discriminatory against same-sex couples.

Lithuanian Gay League (LGL) is of a position that the proposed Constitutional amendment not only seeks to discriminate directly against same-sex families through removing them from the ambit of the Constitutional protection, but also discriminates against unmarried different-sex couples and their children. According to the Board Chair Vladimir Simonko, “the State has a positive obligation to promote family diversity and not to seek to impose a preferred mode of conducting one’s live through discriminatory measures.”