Hong Kong’s top court ruled in favor of married LGBTQIA people’s housing and inheritance rights.
The Court of Final Appeal’s verdicts – all of them reached unanimously by a panel of five judges – involved three separate judicial reviews. Two of the cases involved a challenge of the government’s Public Rental Housing Scheme and the Home Ownership Scheme, which excluded same-sex partners in its definition of “ordinary families” and “spouses.” The third case was related to inheritance laws that only recognized those in a “valid marriage” (excluding same-sex couples) can inherit the property of their partners if they passed away without a will.
Nick Infinger lodged a review of the government’s housing policy in 2018, after the housing authority rejected his public housing application with his same-sex partner. The Home Ownership Scheme review was filed by Edgar Ng after he was told he needed to pay a premium in order for his same-sex partner, Henry Li, to co-own their flat. Ng died by suicide in 2020, so Li continued the case. Meanwhile, the third case on inheritance laws was also lodged by Ng, and similarly taken over by Li.
In all three cases, the Court of First Instance sided with LGBTQIA people.
In 2020 and 2021, the court actually already ruled in favor of recognizing same-sex couples, stating that they should have equal access to public housing under the Public Rental Housing Scheme and Home Ownership Scheme, and be granted inheritance rights.
Nonetheless, the government had been challenging the ruling – e.g. in October, the housing authority defended its anti-LGBTQIA policy by claiming that its policies were intended to support the government’s aim of population growth by encouraging procreation.
But the Court of Final Appeal judges rejected this line of thinking, stating that the authority’s “overriding objective” was to meet the housing needs of low-income people.
The court also rejected the government’s argument that only opposite-sex partners had the legal responsibility to financially support each other. Similarly, the court stated that “a surviving same-sex spouse should be included as a (inheritance) beneficiary due to the close inter-personal relationship between a married same-sex couple”; this is particularly since the inheritance laws already provide for beneficiaries other than those the deceased owed any legal duty of maintenance, such as parents, siblings and uncles and aunts.
Same-sex sexual activities are legal in Hong Kong (since 1991), but there are still no laws to protect the LGBTQIA community from discrimination. There is still no marriage equality in Hong Kong.
