The achievement of rights of same-sex couples is an actual topic in contemporary law. This is especially in focus of the professional and academic publicity in the transitional countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this paper authors considered the issue of the achievement of the same-sex couples' rights in the legal system of this country in the context of the European Court of Human Rights practice and obligations arising from the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols. The aim of this paper is to determine to which extent the national legal order of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country trying to accede to European integration, implements european standards of human rights and freedoms with the final goal to point to the omissions and possible directions for reform.

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The institutes of contemporary family law are rooted in Roman law, including the property relations of marital partners. From the historical perspective, the property-legal relations of marital partners in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were subject to religious regulations and the rules of the General Civil Code and Family Law of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The article analyzes the solutions applied during the Roman, the Ottoman, and the AustroHungarian rule as well as the solutions included in the currently valid Basic Law on Marriage and Family Laws in BiH. The authors focus on the development of family law in terms of property relations of marital partners and provide historical-legal overview of the development of family law from the absolute power of pater familias to the full equality of marital partners.

In several cases the the European Court of Justice (ECJ) interpreted the provisions of the Agreement on the European Community in terms of homosexual rights. The practice of the ECJ in the last five years (2008-2013) shows the tendency to expand the rights of homosexual persons. The paper brings the analysis of four decision of the ECJ in the cases where it decided on the issue of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. In the first two verdicts, the Court refused to compare marriage and common-law marriage to the same-sex union of life, thus limiting same-sex partners to achieve certain rights. In other two cases the Court made step forward and compared marriage and same-sex union of life but only if both, marriage and same-sex union of life are regulated by national law.

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