A senior legal adviser of the EU has said that same-sex partners of EU citizens enjoy the same free movement rights as partners of a different gender. Advocate general Melchior Wathelet at the Court of Justice of the European Union wrote in an opinion published on 11 January that Romania had wrongly denied a work and residence permit to the male spouse of a Romanian man. The couple married in Belgium in 2010, but when they tried to move to Romania two years later, the government refused to grant them the necessary documents.