When the highest court held the government to account
In 2023, Hong Kong's highest court obliged the government to recognise same-sex couples.
On 5 September 2023, Hong Kong's highest court handed down a ruling that the city has still not been able to shake off. The Court of Final Appeal decided that the government owes same-sex couples legal recognition. The judges did not read a right to marriage into the constitution. But they held that a life entirely without a legal framework violates the right to privacy. Anyone who cannot register their relationship anywhere is demeaned and disadvantaged in everyday life.
The case had been brought by Jimmy Sham. In Hong Kong he is known above all as a leader of the democracy movement, the man who organised the big protest marches for years. He had married his husband in New York in 2013. At home this marriage counted for nothing. In 2018 he went to court, lost before the Court of Appeal in 2022 and in the end was partly vindicated after all. He could not celebrate the success. At the time, Sham was in custody, charged under the national security law that Beijing had imposed on the city.
The court gave the government two years. The deadline passed. A bill that would only have covered partnerships concluded abroad came before the Legislative Council in summer 2025 and was voted down there in September by seventy-one votes to fourteen. Not because it did not go far enough for activists, although it did not, but because the pro-Beijing majority refused to accept it even as a minimal solution. Hong Kong is thus in the rare position of openly leaving an order of its own highest court unfulfilled.