Hong Kong court fails to solidify stance on LGBTQ+ rights
A High Court judge appeared to be sending mixed signals on Friday as he handed down two judgements that took different stances toward the rights of Hong Kong’s LGBTQ+ community.
In one case involving LGBTQ+ rights, Justice Anderson Chow ruled in favour of a gay homeowner who challenged Hong Kong’s inheritance laws. In a separate case, however, the judge refused to legally recognize an overseas same-sex marriage.
Edgar Ng won the legal challenge on Friday against the city’s inheritance and intestacy laws, which he argued were discriminatory on the grounds of sexual orientation because the laws do not allow his husband to inherit his estate without it being explicitly expressed in his will.
According to legal documents, Ng bought a government housing apartment in Hong Kong in 2018, one year after he married his husband in the U.K. Under the city’s current property policy, his husband is not considered the natural beneficiary of Ng’s will because their union in the U.K. is not recognized in Hong Kong as a valid marriage.
Chow said in the judgement that excluding same-sex spouses from inheritance rights amounted to “unlawful discrimination” and that it could not be proven that offering the same rights to same-sex married couples would adversely affect the traditional institution of marriage.
In a separate case, however, Chow dismissed an application for a judicial review submitted by Jimmy Sham, the convenor of local pro-democracy group Civil Human Rights Front, for overseas homosexual marriages to be legally recognized in the same way that heterosexual marriages are.
Sham and his husband registered their marriage in New York, where same-sex unions were legalized in 2011 under the Marriage Equality Act.
Chow said in his ruling that to determine whether a marriage concluded in a foreign country was valid in Hong Kong, it was necessary to consider whether the parties involved would be eligible to enter into a marriage in the city.
Chow concluded that as both Sham and his partner are Hong Kong permanent residents, their marriage could not be recognized in Hong Kong because existing laws regarding matrimonial proceedings do not allow for same-sex marriages while the Basic Law and the Bill of Rights Ordinance do not protect the rights of same-sex spouses.
Advocacy group Hong Kong Marriage Equality said in a statement that Ng’s case was an “important victory for LGBT+ equality” and sent a “clear signal to society that unequal treatment of same-sex couples is not justified,” but added that there was still much to be done to promote equality for the city’s same-sex couples.
The city’s Court of Final Appeal ruled in 2018 that foreign same-sex partners would qualify for a spousal visa to live and work in Hong Kong. Other rights for same-sex couples, however, are still denied in Hong Kong.
Click
here for Chinese version
---------------------------------
Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app:
bit.ly/2yMMfQETo download the latest version,
Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play