Same-Sex Partnerships : Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s top court has ruled in favour of recognising same-sex partnerships but stopped short of granting full marriage rights to the city’s LGBTQ community.
- The court gave the government two years to come up with a legal framework for legal recognition of same-sex partnerships.
- In 133 countries homosexuality decriminalised, but only in 32 of them same-sex marriage is legal.
- Hong Kong does not allow or grant same-sex marriage or unions, even though homosexuality has been decriminalized in the city since 1991.
- Activists had been hoping the court would declare that the denial of same-sex marriage breached equal rights protections in the city’s mini-constitution.
- Judges ruled the freedom to marry was guaranteed under the mini-constitution but that it only referred “to heterosexual marriage.”
- Instead, the judges ruled in a majority verdict that there was a need for “an alternative framework” granting legal recognition to same-sex couples “to provide them with a sense of legitimacy, dispelling any sense that they belong to an inferior class of persons whose relationship is undeserving of recognition.”
