Free legal representation for people who cannot find it elsewhere. A training ground for the next generation of Hong Kong's lawyers. Live cases, real research, rigorous supervision.
The clinic takes on cases in five core areas. In each, students work alongside practising lawyers on live matters — drafting submissions, interviewing clients, and conducting the empirical and doctrinal research that policy reform depends on.
We represent non-refoulement claimants through every stage of Hong Kong's Unified Screening Mechanism (USM) — from first interview through TCAB appeals and judicial review. Our students also conduct empirical research into detention costs, healthcare access, and patterns in published TCAB decisions.
Read more →In the absence of specific anti-trafficking legislation, we represent potential victims in criminal, immigration, and non-refoulement proceedings. Our research — including a comparative analysis of Mainland China and Hong Kong's legal frameworks — builds the empirical record that reform depends on.
Read more →We represent patients under Conditional Discharge orders at Mental Health Review Tribunal hearings, advise on conditions imposed by halfway houses, and work with NGO partners to produce practical tools — including bilingual guides and a mobile app — that make legal rights knowable and usable.
Read more →We support families seeking to remain together, identify children at risk of abuse or exploitation, and engage with public institutions where casework reveals gaps in existing protocols. Our work spans legal representation, welfare access advocacy, and direct engagement with the Hospital Authority and social services.
Read more →We provide direct legal support to survivors — attending at hospital, guiding clients through police reporting and statement-taking, gathering the evidential record that proceedings require, and pursuing civil remedies including injunctions to protect survivors and their children.
Read more →Student research, case notes, data analysis and policy briefs across every practice area.
Explore showcases →The clients who most need a clinic often arrive at our door already bearing the weight of being misunderstood, disbelieved, or insufficiently served by the systems they once hoped might help them. A student who walks into a first client meeting equipped only with textbook knowledge — or even their own preconceptions of how lawyers should act — will unintentionally cause harm.
Students joining the clinic are therefore trained not only in the doctrine and procedure of their subject area, but in the harder skills: trauma-informed interviewing, interpreter-mediated communication, the discipline of knowing when not to push a reluctant client, and how to distinguish reluctance born of traumatic experience from a genuine absence of facts. Much of this training is delivered in partnership with frontline practitioners — most notably the Hong Kong Dignity Institute, whose psychosocial team teaches our students directly on trauma and its presentation in the legal interview.
Our students also work with frontier research tools — including AI-assisted legal analysis — to build the kind of empirical evidence base that moves policy. In 2024, our AI-assisted judgment coding work was showcased at the Hong Kong AI Educational Expo, co-hosted by five universities under the UGC Fund for Innovative Technology in Education.
We train students to understand the impact derived from the combination of direct client work, empirical research, and policy reform work. We think this will benefit Hong Kong.
Our students are trained alongside frontline practitioners. The clinic's partnership with the Hong Kong Dignity Institute brings interdisciplinary teaching directly into the syllabus — so students learn to read a survivor's account, conduct an interview, and frame a submission in ways that do not compound the harm clients have already experienced.
Emily trains the clinic's students in trauma-informed care and delivers a recurring lecture on understanding trauma, its physiological effects, and how it shapes the legal interview. She walks students through case studies — anonymised but drawn from real clinic matters — that show how credibility, language, and grooming dynamics play out in the courtroom, and why a trauma-informed legal practice produces both better evidence and better outcomes for survivors.
Two ongoing clinic projects — one tracing the hidden economy of immigration detention, one examining why equal legal entitlement to healthcare does not always translate into equal access.
Drawing on Security Bureau Finance Committee papers, Immigration Department responses to Access to Information requests, and the public budget, our research tracks the expanding economy of Hong Kong's immigration detention estate.
The clinic's research combines frontline interviews with doctrinal legal analysis to examine what actually happens when asylum seekers in Hong Kong fall ill. The finding is sharper than the headline usually allows: non-refoulement claimants have the same entitlements to public healthcare as local residents — but language barriers, discrimination, fear, and limited understanding of how to navigate the system can leave that formal entitlement unrealised in practice.
The entitlement is equal. The barriers to realising it are not.
Our work focuses on identifying these practical gaps and developing ways lawyers, interpreters, and NGO partners can help bridge them.
Publication forthcoming
Patricia Ho is a Principal Lecturer at HKU Faculty of Law, specialising in public law, forced migration, and human trafficking. As Director of the Public Interest Clinic, she leads experiential legal education in strategic research and direct client advocacy. She is the founder of Patricia Ho & Associates and the Hong Kong Dignity Institute, where she developed an interdisciplinary socio-legal practice model integrating legal representation with multi-disciplinary casework to address transnational exploitation.
Her publications include 'Seeking Protection: The Interplay of Human Trafficking and the Refugee Space in Hong Kong' (2023) 31(3) Michigan State International Law Review 499; 'Traffickers and Victims: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin?' (2022) 18 Anti-Trafficking Review 190 (with H. Leung and C. Yeung); and the chapter on 'Discrimination' in Halsbury's Laws of Hong Kong (Vol 22, 2nd edn). She has instructed in landmark cases including ZN v Secretary for Justice [2020] HKCFA 53 — Hong Kong's first judicial review on slavery and servitude — and CB v Commissioner of Police [2025] HKCFA 10. She co-drafted the proposed Crimes (Amendment) (Modern Slavery) Bill 2019, introduced into the Legislative Council.
Chelsea is a public interest lawyer working with the grassroots community. As a migrant from mainland China, but educated locally, Chelsea is interested in migration and intersectionality. Derived from her prior engagement as a civic journalist during her college years, Chelsea is committed to empowerment and social justice. After obtaining her law degrees in LLB and PCLL at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chelsea was trained at Daly & Associates — one of the city's renowned public interest law firms pioneering reforms in non-refoulement protection. Having built her extensive experience in defending the rights of marginalised groups in administrative and immigration matters, Chelsea was admitted as a solicitor in 2022 and continues her collaboration with psychosocial experts to provide legal support to minorities.
The clinic's casework and research would not be possible without the NGOs, charities and frontline organisations who refer clients, share expertise, and stand with our clients after we do. Among them, the Hong Kong Dignity Institute works alongside the clinic across every practice area, providing the frontline continuity of care that the clinic's legal work depends on.