Iceland

On June 11, 2010, Iceland’s parliament unanimously voted, 49 to 0, to end the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. The Althingi parliament voted to add the words “man and man, woman and woman” to the country’s existing marriage legislation. In 2009, the country became the first in the world to elect an openly gay head of state, when Johanna Sigurdardottir became the prime minister. Iceland is the seventh country in Europe to uphold the freedom to marry, and ninth in the world.