Reforming Cohabitation Rights

This chapter turns to the book’s sixth reform proposal and this is in many ways the most important one. The introduction of the kind of cohabitation rights found in other jurisdictions would do much to alleviate the problem of unregistered religious marriages. This chapter explores how cohabitation rights on relationship breakdown would provide a remedy to those who are in unregistered religious marriages where the decision not to enter into a legal marriage has not been entered into voluntarily or where the relationship has changed over time so that one party has become reliant on the other or have suffered a detriment as a result of the relationship.