Hong Kong courts rule in same-sex couples’ favor

Hong Kong’s Court of Appeals ruled in favor of two same-sex couples in separate cases involving their rights to own and rent public housing.

Same-sex marriage is not legal in the city. The rulings follow other decisions that have firmly established same-sex couples’ rights to equal treatment under the law.

Related:

Trans activists in Hong Kong win landmark victory for gender identification

The plaintiffs were fighting a policy requiring them to medically transition before legally changing their gender.

One case involved a couple who were married in Canada. The city’s housing authority had declined to consider their application to rent an apartment.

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The other couple was married in Britain. The housing authority had denied them joint-ownership rights to a government-subsidized apartment.

The government had appealed lower court rulings in the couples’ favor, but the appeals court took the government to task, saying the decisions were “discriminatory in nature.”

“The differential treatment in the present cases is a more severe form of indirect discrimination than most cases because the criterion is one which same-sex couples can never meet,” the judges said in their ruling.

In September, the court ruled that a married lesbian couple should both have parental status over their child who was born via in vitro fertilization.

The top court also ruled that month against same-sex marriage but gave the government two years to develop a framework “for access to an alternative legal framework in order to meet basic social requirements.”