Abstract

Increasingly in regional and international law, attention is at last being devoted to recognizing and protecting the fundamental rights of homosexual individuals and couples (§ 2). This is especially true in the domestic law of an ever greater number of democratic countries (§ 3). Even so, this process has been held back by prejudices that continue to make the assertion and protection of such rights slow and uncertain. It would therefore be a mistake to either disregard or underestimate such difficulties, considering that they offer a paradigmatic example of the recurrent temptation to ignore the inherently pluralist character of the conception of fundamental rights that took hold in the second half of twentieth century (§ 4).