Hong Kong’s top court has ruled to affirm housing and inheritance rights for same-sex couples, siding against the government in a victory for the city’s LGBTQ community.
Chief Justice Andrew Cheung wrote in two rulings on Tuesday that the Court of Final Appeal had unanimously dismissed appeals brought by the Hong Kong government against earlier decisions affirming LGBTQ rights.
Government lawyer Monica Carss-Frisk had argued that Hong Kong’s housing policy was designed to support “procreation” among opposite-sex partners.
But in his ruling, Cheung said policies excluding same-sex couples from public rental flats and subsidised flats sold under the city’s Home Ownership Scheme “cannot be justified”.
“[For] needy same-sex married couples who cannot afford private rental accommodation, the [government’s] exclusionary policy could well mean depriving them of any realistic opportunity of sharing family life under the same roof at all,” Cheung said.
On the issue of inheritance, judges Joseph Fok and Roberto Ribeiro wrote in Tuesday’s ruling that authorities had also “failed to justify the differential treatment” of same-sex couples.
The judges deemed existing rules excluding same-sex couples from benefits applicable to a husband and wife when it comes to distributing a deceased person’s estate “discriminatory and unconstitutional”.
Tuesday’s ruling marks the end of a six-year legal battle that began when resident Nick Infinger took Hong Kong’s government to court over a policy excluding him and his partner from public rental housing as they were not deemed an “ordinary family”.
The case was later heard together with that of another couple, Henry Li and his late husband Edgar Ng, who also challenged government policies on subsidised housing and inheritance rules excluding same-sex couples.
Infinger and Li won their constitutional challenge in the Hong Kong Court of Appeal in October 2023. But the government in February took the cases to the Court of Final Appeal, where the panel of five local judges ruled this week.
The ruling comes after a partial victory for LGBTQ rights in Hong Kong in September 2023, when the same court ruled against granting full marriage rights to same-sex couples, but gave the government two years to set up a framework extending other rights.
Activists have said they hope the mandated framework will protect LGBTQ rights in a more systemic way, so they won’t have to rely on incremental wins in court.
Advocacy group Hong Kong Marriage Equality applauded Tuesday’s rulings, but urged the government “to immediately end the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage”.
Public support for same-sex marriage in Hong Kong is growing and hit 60 percent last year, according to a joint survey by three universities.
