Same-sex marriage in Belgium 14 December and published on 23 December 1999 made the Act of statutory cohabitation go into effect on 1 January 2000. During 1999, the PS (French-speaking Social Democrats) and Ecolo (French-speaking Greens) also announced they agreed to legalise same-sex marriage. At that point, the only remaining party in Government that opposed same-sex marriage was the French-speaking liberal PRL (later merged into MR), mainly because it was opposed to adoption rights for same-sex couples. PRL agreed not to block same-sex marriage if adoption rights are excluded. As the first same-sex marriage in the Netherlands was performed on 1 April 2001, the
Recognition of same-sex unions in Greece cohabiting couples, Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens, the most respected-bishop of the Church of Greece, suggested that "[t]here is a need to change with the time". It is unclear, however, whether this view applied to same-sex couples, particularly as the Church has previously opposed LGBT rights in general and civil union laws in particular. "Law 3719/2008" ("Reforms concerning the family, children and society"), which entered into force on 26 November 2008, established a form of partnership known as "cohabitation agreements" ("σύμφωνο συμβίωσης"), only available to opposite-sex couples. Before the legislative elections of 4 October 2009, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK)