For widow’s pension – A Styrian woman divorced her husband eleven times

After the death of her first husband in 1981, the woman received a widow’s pension. In October 1982 she married her second husband for the first time, from whom she divorced for the first time in 1988. The claimant subsequently married her second husband eleven more times until May 2022 and divorced him just as often, although the two always lived in a registered partnership with a shared household.

Woman collected widow’s pension
After each divorce, the woman again collected the widow’s pension, to which she was entitled again after the death of her first husband, as well as a severance payment of 2.5 times the annual salary of the widow’s pension. After the last and twelfth marriage, the pension insurer had had enough and refused to pay out.

The woman subsequently filed a lawsuit, but all authorities denied her claim for the widow’s pension on the grounds that “her second husband’s now twelfth divorce represents an abuse of the divorce law.”

OGH confirmed the verdict
The Supreme Court has now upheld the judgment – also arguing that the woman and her current ex-husband had wrongly claimed that the marriage had broken down irretrievably: “It can rather be assumed that the plaintiff and her second husband did this in the During the course of the The twelfth divorce was wrongly pronounced and thus an amicable divorce was obtained, even though the conditions for this were not met.” This means that the most recent divorce has also become invalid. In other words, the Styrian woman and her husband are – at least currently – still married.