Government refuses to publish cohabitation White Paper now

The government has turned down a request by the pro-divorce movement to publish the draft cohabitation Bill before the May 28 referendum.

The White Paper should be made public so people would know what choices were available before casting their vote, Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando said during the movement’s first meeting with Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi at the Nationalist Party headquarters in Pietà, yesterday.

The movement urged Dr Gonzi to publish proposals for a law regulating cohabitation which, it said, had already been forwarded to President George Abela.

Dr Gonzi disagreed, saying a debate on the Bill before the referendum would disrupt the divorce discussion.

So far, Malta, he said, has had an institution of permanent marriages. In the referendum, people had to choose between retaining such marriages and opting for four-year ones. This, he said, had nothing to do with cohabitation, which could also be between brothers and sisters or same-sex couples.

The country, Dr Gonzi added, required a law that regulated cohabitation independently of the introduction of divorce.

Former Nationalist minister Michael Falzon said the pro-divorce movement was not asking people to choose between stable and broken marriages.

The family, he said, remained a strong cell within society: “We believe the family is the basis of Maltese society. But a cohabitation law will not bring order to society.”

Cohabitation law without divorce, he argued, institutionalised disorder. Such a law would give rise to a two-tiered society having married and cohabiting couples, he added.

Mr Falzon said he could not understand what the state was gaining by forcing people whose marriage had broken down to cohabit rather than giving them the opportunity to remarry. “Moreover, how can one give cohabitation rights to someone who is still legally bound to another person?”

Later on, during a press conference, movement chairman Deborah Schembri said Dr Gonzi told the pro-divorce movement the government’s approach to cohabitation law was the same as regulations governing the rendering of services.

“I find it humiliating and degrading that a woman who chooses to cohabit would be considered as providing a service to her partner,” she said, adding this approach applied to both partners in a relationship.

Dr Schembri doubted whether the cohabitation law would be applicable to separated couples. The country would end up in a situation “very close to bigamy”.

Dr Schembri insisted that regulating cohabitation before introducing divorce would lead to social chaos. Social stability, she added, emerged from marriage relationships, insisting that the introduction of divorce preceded cohabitation law. Dr Pullicino Orlando urged the anti-divorce movement to appeal to the government to publish the Bill on cohabitation. He stressed it was more correct to divorce rather than formalise cohabitation.

He noted that 35,000 individuals would have gone through a broken marriage by 2015.