A Seoul Court Just Called a Same-Sex Relationship a 'De Facto Marriage.' Marriage Itself Still Isn't Legal.
The Seoul Central District Court ruled that a same-sex couple formed a legally protectable domestic partnership, ordering a third party to pay damages for breaking it up. It's the latest step in a pattern: South Korean courts keep expanding protections for same-sex couples while marriage equality itself stays just out of reach.
South Korea does not recognize same-sex marriage, and the legal path toward it remains genuinely uncertain. But a June ruling from the Seoul Central District Court has quietly expanded what the law is willing to acknowledge about the relationships same-sex couples actually build — and it’s worth understanding both what the case decided and, just as importantly, what it pointedly did not.
What the court actually ruled
The case involved a same-sex partner, referred to in court documents as A, who sued C — the former partner of A’s own ex, referred to as B — over the breakdown of A and B’s relationship. Under Korean tort law, a third party can sometimes be held liable for damages when they’re responsible for breaking up a marriage-like relationship. The trouble was that a lower court had already dismissed A’s claim, ruling that same-sex relationships weren’t legally protected in the first place, meaning there was nothing for a third party to have damaged.
The Civil Appeal Division of the Seoul Central District Court reversed that. The judges — Kim So-young, Jang Chang-guk, and Moon Jong-cheol — found that A and B’s relationship went well beyond a romantic partnership: the couple was recognized by both of their families, attended family events together, and shared financial responsibilities including jointly paying for their apartment. That combination, the court held, amounted to “a de facto living community with mutual intentions of marriage, combining economically, physically, and emotionally” — and that community deserved legal protection regardless of whether Korean law recognizes same-sex marriage itself. The court ordered C to pay A 10 million won, about $8,500, out of the 30 million won A had sought.
“De facto marriage” is an existing, well-established concept in Korean law — a legal recognition extended to couples who live as spouses without formally registering a marriage. It’s been applied to heterosexual couples for decades. What’s new is applying it to a same-sex couple, and the court leaned explicitly on precedent to get there: a landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision that found excluding same-sex partners from spousal health insurance benefits amounted to discrimination. That ruling didn’t grant marriage equality either, but it established that Korean law could recognize a same-sex relationship as functionally equivalent to a marriage for specific legal purposes. The June ruling extends that same logic to tort liability.
The distinction the court was careful to draw
Marriage for All Korea, a advocacy group involved in the country’s marriage equality litigation, welcomed the ruling as building on the 2024 health insurance precedent. But rights groups reviewing the decision, including ILGA Asia, were careful to flag exactly how narrow it is. The court explicitly distinguished between two separate legal questions: whether to recognize a legal or common-law marriage between two people of the same sex, and whether to recognize a marriage-like life partnership between them as an interest worth protecting under the law. It answered only the second question. The first — actual marriage recognition — remains untouched by this case.
ILGA Asia’s Executive Director, Henry Koh, put the tension plainly: the ruling “acknowledges a reality long understood by countless families and communities… While the decision does not establish marriage equality, it reinforces the principle that same-sex relationships are deserving of protection and respect.” The organization also noted a structural problem with this case-by-case approach: it puts the burden on same-sex couples to prove the legitimacy of their relationship after the fact, typically only once something has already gone wrong, rather than granting recognition upfront the way marriage registration does for everyone else.
Where the bigger fight stands
The June ruling doesn’t exist in isolation. Eleven same-sex couples filed marriage equality lawsuits across six courts in the Seoul metropolitan area back in October 2024. Nine of those cases have since been dismissed; two remain pending trial. Separately, South Korea’s Constitutional Court is actively considering cases that challenge the Civil Code’s exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage altogether — the case that could eventually force the question TrueQueer readers actually want answered.
Until then, South Korea’s approach to same-sex relationships looks like a patchwork built one lawsuit at a time: health insurance in 2024, tort protection for domestic partnerships in 2026, marriage equality lawsuits grinding slowly through lower courts and now the Constitutional Court. Each case chips away at the legal invisibility same-sex couples have faced, without any of them delivering what a straightforward marriage law would provide in one step. It’s progress that’s real and worth marking — and also, unmistakably, a system still asking same-sex couples to win their relationships’ legitimacy in court, one case at a time, rather than simply recognizing it.
