30/06/2023
Opposite-sex life partners—Whether there was a duty of support
The applicant and the respondent had been involved in nine-year long romantic relationship, from which three children were born. After the termination of the relationship, the applicant approached the Western Cape High Court to lodge an action for an order declaring that the parties were in a permanent life partnership in terms of which they had undertaken reciprocal duties of support towards each other, and directing the respondent to maintain her. In the current application before the Western Cape High Court the applicant sought interim maintenance. Complementary to her claim, she sought the development of the common law to recognise ‘that partners, in life-partnerships in which the partners had, during the existence of the life-partnership, undertaken to each other reciprocal duties of support, are entitled to claim maintenance from one another following upon the termination of the life partnership’. The court, however, declined the relief sought: Firstly, the applicant had not provided a factual basis for the development of the common law in the manner sought. Furthermore, the development was in any case unnecessary: it had recently been decided by the Constitutional Court that a legally enforceable duty of support may arise out of a permanent life partnership, as long as it could be established that factually there existed a duty of support, and that it existed in a familial setting. EW v VH 2023 (4) SA 123 (WCC)
South African Law Reports July 2023
