A family court has rejected the Costa Rican government’s long-running attempt to annul our country’s first same-sex marriage, reaffirming the 2015 union of Laura Flórez-Estrada Pimentel and Jazmín Elizondo Arias more than a decade after they wed and six years after marriage equality took effect nationwide.
The Family Court of the First Judicial Circuit of San José threw out a nullity claim that the Office of the Attorney General (Procuraduría General de la República, or PGR) first filed in 2016, according to a ruling reported Friday by the daily La Nación. The judge, Walter Alvarado Arias, found the marriage valid under both Costa Rican and international law, writing that the union “is absolutely legal under constitutional and conventional norms.”
In his decision, Alvarado leaned on advisory opinion OC-24/17, issued in January 2018 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which held that countries bound by the American Convention must extend marriage to same-sex couples. He noted that when Costa Rica’s Constitutional Chamber struck down the ban on same-sex unions, it established that the prohibition had been void from the moment it was enacted.
The case stretches back to 2015, when Flórez-Estrada and Elizondo married at a time when same-sex unions were still illegal in Costa Rica. The wedding was made possible by a clerical error at the National Registry that listed Elizondo as male. The marriage was later revoked, reinstated and annulled at different stages through years of litigation and notarial disciplinary proceedings, even as the broader legal landscape shifted decisively in the couple’s favor.
That shift came on May 26, 2020, when Costa Rica became the first country in Central America to legalize same-sex marriage. The change followed a 2018 Constitutional Chamber ruling that adopted the Inter-American Court’s guidance and gave lawmakers 18 months to act; when the Legislative Assembly did not, the articles barring same-sex marriage automatically fell away. Costa Rica was the 29th country in the world to recognize marriage equality. Flórez-Estrada welcomed the decision. “We’re very happy this finally happened, because we’ve waited a long time,” she said.
The ruling closes one of the last open chapters of a case that helped define LGBTQ rights in our country. For the thousands of foreign visitors and residents who choose Costa Rica in part for its reputation as one of Latin America’s more welcoming destinations for LGBTQ travelers, the decision reaffirms a legal foundation that has been settled in practice since 2020 but contested in the courts for far longer.
