by Jasmine Siu

Hong Kong’s High Court ruled in favour of a gay homeowner seeking equal inheritance rights for his partner, but rejected a bid to recognise foreign same-sex marriages in a bittersweet day involving two important judgments on the rights of sexual minorities in the city.

Mr Justice Anderson Chow Ka-ming ruled on two separate cases on Friday, a year after he concluded the government had no positive obligation to provide an alternative legal framework for equal treatment as it was not unconstitutional to deny same-sex couples their right to marriage.

Edgar Ng Hon-lam won his challenge targeting the marriage provisions in ordinances on intestacy and financial provision for dependants, following earlier successes in other fields such as taxation, civil servants’ benefits or application of dependant visas. Ng, who was not in court on Friday, had applied for judicial review out of concern that his husband would not be able to inherit his estate in the absence of a will or other estate planning because their union in London was not considered a valid marriage in Hong Kong.

Sham, the Civil Human Rights Front convenor, lost his bid for a general declaration that Hong Kong laws violated the constitutional right to equality when they recognised foreign heterosexual marriages but not homosexual ones, such as his, registered in New York.

In the Ng case, the judge ruled there was an unjustified differential treatment accorded to same-sex married couples dealing with legal entitlements and benefits relating to inheritance, which constituted unlawful discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. He found Sham’s attempt to achieve complete parity of legal recognition “too ambitious” and “fundamentally flawed” when the basic question of whether there was differential treatment “cannot be answered in a vacuum”, without subject matter or context, which Hong Kong’s top court had ruled as a “crucial” consideration. Read more via SCMP