Namibia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday recognised same-sex marriages contracted abroad between citizens and foreign spouses, a landmark ruling in a country where homosexuality is illegal.

The decision overturns a ruling reached last year by the High Court, which refused to accept same-sex marriages consummated outside Namibia.

Two Namibian nationals had sought recourse from the courts after the ministry of home affairs and immigration refused to grant permits to same-sex foreign spouses whom they had married outside the country.

“This Court accordingly found that the approach of the Ministry to exclude spouses, including the appellants, in a validly concluded same-sex marriage… infringes both the interrelated rights to dignity and equality of the appellants,” the ruling said.

Former Mr Gay Namibia, Wendelinus Hamuteny via Instagram

Annette Seiler, who is married to German national Anita Seiler-Lilles, brought the case along with Namibian citizen Johann Potgieter and his South African husband, Matsobane Daniel Digashu.

Their marriages were respectively concluded in Germany and South Africa

Namibia has seen a flurry of court cases on the rights of same-sex couples to marry, become parents and immigrate.

Homosexuality is illegal in Namibia under a rarely-enforced 1927 sodomy law dating to its period under South African rule.

South Africa, under its liberal post-apartheid constitution, is the sole African nation which allows gay marriage, legalised in 2006.

In March this year, the same paramount court overturned a decision by a lower court to grant citizenship to a gay couple’s four-year-old son who was born in neighbouring South Africa through surrogacy.