Judge rules government policies favoring heterosexuals ‘cannot be justified’.
Hong Kong’s highest court has ruled to guarantee housing and inheritance rights for gay people, siding with 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 previous rulings guaranteeing LGBTQ rights.
Government lawyer Monica Carss-Frisk said Hong Kong’s housing policy was designed to support “procreation” of opposite-sex partners.
But in his ruling, Cheung said policies that exclude same-sex couples from public rental housing and subsidized flats sold under the city’s Home Ownership Scheme are “unforgivable”.
“[For] indigent same-sex couples who cannot afford rental housing, the [government’s] a policy of exclusion would mean depriving them of any realistic opportunity to share family life under one roof at all,” said Cheung.
In the inheritance case, judges Joseph Fok and Roberto Ribeiro wrote in Tuesday’s decision that the authorities also “failed to justify the different treatment” of same-sex people.
The judges saw existing laws that exclude same-sex couples from the benefits that apply to husband and wife when it comes to the distribution of a deceased person’s estate as “discriminatory and unconstitutional”.
Tuesday’s ruling marks the end of a six-year legal battle that began when resident Nick Infinger took the Hong Kong government to court over a policy that excluded him and his partner from public rental housing as they were not considered a “normal family”.
The case was later tried alongside another couple, Henry Li and her late husband Edgar Ng, who also challenged the government’s policies on subsidized housing and non-same-sex inheritance laws.
Infinger and Li won their constitutional challenge at Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal in October 2023. But the government in February took the cases to the Court of Final Appeal, where a panel of five local judges issued a ruling this week.
The decision 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 to extend other rights.
Activists said they hope the mandated framework will protect LGBTQ rights in a systematic way, so they won’t have to rely on additional benefits from the court.
Gay rights group Hong Kong Marriage Equality applauded Tuesday’s decision, but urged the government to “immediately stop same-sex marriage exclusions”.
Public support for same-sex marriage in Hong Kong is growing and reached 60 percent last year, according to a joint study by three universities.
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