# Hong Kong top court upholds same-sex couples' housing and inheritance rights
Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal has ruled that the government cannot keep excluding same-sex couples from public rental housing, subsidised home ownership schemes and inheritance benefits, handing the city’s LGBTQ community a major legal victory on a day that extended a six-year court battle.
Chief Justice Andrew Cheung wrote the key housing ruling and said the policy blocking same-sex married couples from access to public flats and subsidised flats under the Home Ownership Scheme "cannot be justified". The court also rejected the government’s attempt to overturn earlier decisions in the inheritance case, with judges Joseph Fok and Roberto Ribeiro concluding that authorities had failed to justify treating same-sex couples differently when distributing a deceased person’s estate.
The decisions are important not only because they settle the specific cases, but because they confirm again that exclusion from core family benefits cannot be defended simply by reference to tradition or to the government’s stated preference for heterosexual couples. In the housing case, government lawyer Monica Carss-Frisk had argued that the policy was designed to support "procreation" among opposite-sex partners. The court did not accept that rationale. Cheung said that for needy same-sex married couples who cannot afford private rental accommodation, exclusion from public housing could deprive them of any realistic chance to share family life under one roof.
The inheritance ruling carried the same message in constitutional language. The judges described existing rules that deny same-sex couples the same benefits available to a husband and wife as discriminatory and unconstitutional. Together, the rulings leave Hong Kong’s authorities with another clear instruction from the city’s highest court: a relationship between two people of the same sex cannot by itself justify denial of social rights that are otherwise available to married couples.
The cases were brought by Nick Infinger, who challenged a public rental housing policy that treated him and his partner as not being an ordinary family, and by Henry Li, whose late husband Edgar Ng was part of a separate challenge to both housing and inheritance rules. Their cases were heard together after the Court of Appeal ruled in their favour in October 2023. The government then took both matters to the Court of Final Appeal in February, setting up this week’s unanimous dismissal of the appeals.
The judgments land in a city where legal progress for LGBTQ residents has come in steps rather than in one sweeping change. In September 2023, the same court rejected full marriage rights for same-sex couples but gave the government two years to create a framework for other rights. Tuesday’s rulings strengthen that incremental path while stopping well short of full marriage equality.
That contrast is exactly why advocacy groups continue to press for broader reform. Hong Kong Marriage Equality welcomed the rulings but said the government should immediately end the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. Public support for same-sex marriage in Hong Kong has also been rising, reaching 60 percent last year in a joint survey by three universities, suggesting the legal debate is taking place against a changing social backdrop.
For now, the practical effect of the court’s decision is narrower but concrete. Same-sex married couples who qualify under the rules should no longer be denied public housing or inheritance benefits solely because their relationship does not fit the government’s preferred model. That makes the rulings significant not just as symbolic victories, but as decisions with immediate consequences for housing security, family life and the treatment of surviving spouses in Hong Kong.
