Labour. Widow's or Widower's Pension

The Supreme Court considers that the fact that it has been declared in the deed of execution of a will or the constitution of a limited company is not sufficient for the recognition of the existence of a domestic partnership and, as such, denies the widow's or widower's pension.

Registration in the Registry of Domestic Partnerships is required..

According to the judgement of the Labour Division of the Supreme Court of 9 February 2015, it is expressly established:

…,the simple unilateral declaration of the cohabitants before a notary, accepting the reality of this marital cohabitation in their respective testamentary disposition deeds, cannot now be considered equivalent to the constitution of the unmarried couple required by art. 174. 3 LGSS. Indeed, as this Chamber reasoned at the time, in what appeared to be the solution given by the lower court ruling, "one thing is the expression of the manifestation of the will constituting the common law partnership, and quite another that, for certain effects in the civil or commercial legal sphere, one wishes to assert a certain link, which in this case has a merely circumstantial and opportunistic scope, limited to the business in question". And although, in our case, it seems to be clear from the unchallenged statement of proven facts in the lower court ruling that the manifestation of cohabitation was coincidental, as the testamentary dispositions of the cohabitants were "in the same sense", it seems obvious to us that none of them, either separately or in their joint consideration, can amount to the formal constitution of the unmarried couple that the law requires".

Therefore, we must conclude that registration in the Register of Domestic Partnerships is necessary to avoid any future problems.

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