National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and Others v Minister of Home Affairs and Others, [1999] ZACC 17, is a 1999 decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa which extended to same-sex partners the same benefits granted to spouses in the issuing of immigration permits.

After 1994 the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NGCLE) entered into negotiations with the Department of Home Affairs on various issues, including the recognition of same-sex relationships for immigration purposes.

So that spouses were not immediately deprived of immigration benefits, the order was suspended for twelve months to allow Parliament to correct the unconstitutionality.

The government argued that the case was not "ripe" for the court to hear, claiming that the committees responsible for approving immigration permits could interpret the word "spouse" to include same-sex partners and that the law would then not be discriminatory.

The court, without accepting the validity of this argument, dismissed it as irrelevant, stating that the rights of the South African partners were also affected by the government's policy.

Although unfairness was presumed, the court proceeded to examine the impact of the discrimination on gays and lesbians, noting that they were a vulnerable minority who had suffered from past disadvantage.

[3] In a passage repeatedly quoted in subsequent decisions on the rights of same-sex couples, Justice Ackermann describes "the facts concerning gays and lesbians and their same-sex partnerships":[2] Gays and lesbians in same-sex life partnerships are as capable as heterosexual spouses of expressing and sharing love in its manifold forms including affection, friendship, eros and charity; They are likewise as capable of forming intimate, permanent, committed, monogamous, loyal and enduring relationships; of furnishing emotional and spiritual support; and of providing physical care, financial support and assistance in running the common household; They are individually able to adopt children and in the case of lesbians to bear them; In short, they have the same ability to establish a consortium omnis vitae;

[3] Ackermann was persuaded by the submission of Advocate Wim Trengove (counsel for the appellants) that, as far as deference to the legislature was concerned, there was no difference, in principle, between the court's rendering a statutory provision constitutional by removing the offending part by actual or notional severance, and the court's doing the same thing by reading words into a statutory provision.

Any other conclusion would lead to what he described as the absurdity that the granting of a remedy would depend on the fortuitous circumstance of the form in which the Legislature had chosen to enact the provision in question.

In such case there would be no objection to declaring the exception invalid, where a Court was satisfied that such severance was, on application of whatever the appropriate test might be, constitutionally justified in relation to the Legislature.

[2] The court ruled that the order would not be retrospective, as partners whose applications for a permit had previously been denied were free to reapply in light of the new situation.

In December 2005 the Constitutional Court ruled in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie that Parliament was required to extend marriage to same-sex couples, which it duly did with the passage of the Civil Union Act in November 2006.