A lawyer representing a gay Hong Kong civil servant argued before the Court of Final Appeal today that same-sex marriages are no different than any other, and that denying same-sex spouses the same benefits received by heterosexual couples amounts to nothing less than unjustifiable discrimination on the part of the city’s government.
The comments were made by barrister Karon Monaghan as the landmark hearing on spousal benefits for gay couples kicked off today at the city’s highest court, RTHK reports.
Monaghan represents Angus Leung Chun-kwong, a Hong Kong immigration officer who took the government to court in 2015 after they refused to grant spousal benefits to his husband, Scott Adams, whom he married in New Zealand in 2014.
Leung succeeded in his challenge against the Civil Service Bureau in a lower court, but lost when the bureau appealed that decision.
Leung filed the suit after he was not allowed to apply for benefits civil servants’ spouses are normally entitled to, and was barred from filing a joint tax return because the SAR government doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages.
Lord David Pannick, the lawyer representing the government, argued that granting Leung’s request would “chisel away” at the institution of marriage in Hong Kong.
Addressing top judges at the CFA, Monaghan criticized the Civil Service Bureau and Inland Revenue Department for failing to offer a reasonable justification for for refusing to grant Leung his rights, the South China Morning Post reports.
“It has to be justified,” she argued. “It’s not enough to say marriage is special and unique.”
She went on to say that the government’s rationale in denying Leung the benefits he sought — effectively that the system “is the way it is” — does not constitute a legal argument.
“That is entirely circular,” she said.
Monaghan added that the government’s employment code of conduct promotes equality for all staff, and that the exclusion of same-sex marriages in certain policy areas would be inappropriate and unreasonable.
The movement for marriage equality has seen some interesting developments in recent months.
Last September the government said it would accept the validity of same-sex marriages performed abroad when it comes to granting spousal visas, and just this week, the Filipino pastor of an LGBT-inclusive church filed a motion seeking legal protections to perform non-legally binding same-sex “Holy Unions.”
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