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 On 9 November 2016, the Government submitted a draft bill equalizing cohabitation agreements with marriages in most areas. The bill was approved by Parliament on 2 December, in a 201-21 vote. It was signed into law by President Prokopis Pavlopoulos on 8 December 2016 and took effect upon publication in the government gazette the following day. The number of cohabitation agreements per year is as follows: Gay rights group OLKE announced its intention to sue Greek municipalities that refuse to marry same-sex couples, pointing out a loophole in the 1982 law that legalized civil marriage between "persons", without reference to