“The Court unanimously dismisses” the appeals brought by the Hong Kong government, chief judge Andrew Cheung wrote in two court rulings.

Tuesday’s rulings marked the end of a six-year legal battle that began when resident Nick Infinger took the government to court over a policy that excluded him and his partner from public rental housing on the grounds they were not an “ordinary family”.

The case was later heard together with that of Henry Li and his late husband, Edgar Ng, who challenged government policies on subsidised housing and inheritance rules that barred same-sex couples.

Tuesday’s rulings came after a landmark 2023 decision, also by the Court of Final Appeal, that shut the door on same-sex marriage but gave the government two years to set up an alternative framework for such couples’ rights.

Part of Tuesday’s court rulings concerned Hong Kong’s public rental flats – which house around 28% of the city’s 7.5 million people – and subsidised flats sold under the Home Ownership Scheme.

On the issue of inheritance, lawyer Timothy Otty argued in an October hearing that the existing policy “is not only demeaning, it is irrational and unfair”.

Under the law, same-sex couples could not benefit from the rules applicable to husband and wife when it came to distributing a deceased person’s estate.

Infinger and Li had won in lower courts, but the government in February took the cases to Hong Kong’s highest appeals court, where they were heard by a panel of five local judges.