By Rachel Savage From Reuters

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A lawyer representing a lesbian couple whose court victory legalized same-sex marriage in the Cayman Islands five months ago said a government appeal against the ruling, which opened on Wednesday, sought to deny the basic right to marry.

Chantelle Day, a Caymanian lawyer, and her partner Vickie Bodden Bush went to court last year after they were refused permission to marry in the islands, one of five British overseas territories in the Caribbean where gay marriage is illegal.

“Marriage is a fundamental human right,” said Jonathan Cooper, one of the couple’s lawyers with Doughty Street Chambers in London, at the start of the three-day hearing.

“It feels highly inappropriate to force (the couple) through a further appeal process, when the chief justice in the case in the high court was clear that they were entitled to marry,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Premier of the Cayman Islands, Alden McLaughlin, declined to comment, citing the ongoing proceedings.

In April, he said that the islands’ constitution – which respects the right “to marry a person of the opposite sex” – was designed to reassure Christians that “marriage would retain its traditional definition as the union between a man and a woman”.

For more on this story go to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cayman-lgbt-court/appeal-to-stop-gay-marriage-opens-in-cayman-islands-idUSKCN1VI2B6