PRAGUE, Feb. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Thursday that he has vetoed the bill on registered partnership of same-sex couples.

    The bill will return to the Chamber of Deputies where its supporters need 101 votes out of the house's 200 MPs to override the president's veto.

    Klaus said that the bill over which he got in a dispute with Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek had the support of 86 deputies. Paroubek had called on Klaus to sign the bill into law.

    "Even if I as president did not have a clear opinion, I would insist that such marked intervention in the legal arrangement of human and especially partner and intimate relations must be supported by a majority of deputies, or that at least 101 of them must vote in support of the law," Klaus said.

    Klaus considers the bill bad because it extends the "area of state interventions into people's lives." "This is just the contrary of liberalization," he added.

    He said he hopes that the debate in the lower house will not be just formal and that it will not take the form of "party leaderships pressing on individual deputies."

    The legislation ensures the partners' right to information on the health condition of their partners and a chance to inherit property just as married couples. It also counts with the mutual obligation to pay maintenance and allows the homosexual partners to raise children, but it does not allow them to adopt them.

    According to a poll from last October, only 30 percent of Czechcitizens oppose the introduction of registered partnership, while 62 percent support it. Enditem