Working within the gaps — in casework, in research, and in the law — to build the record that protection requires.
Hong Kong does not have a single, comprehensive anti-trafficking law. Offences are instead spread across multiple ordinances — the Crimes Ordinance, the Employment Ordinance, the Immigration Ordinance, and others — creating a fragmented framework that has been widely criticised as insufficient to guide the identification of victims or the investigation of trafficking as a distinct crime.
In the absence of bespoke legislation, victims are often missed entirely. They may be processed as illegal workers, overstayers, or criminal defendants — without any systematic mechanism to assess whether they were trafficked. The Government has repeatedly maintained that trafficking is not a prevalent problem in Hong Kong. The empirical record — including the experience of individuals the clinic has represented — suggests a more complicated picture.
The clinic's work in this area is ongoing. We represent individuals, we conduct research, and we work with partner organisations across the region to build a more accurate understanding of how trafficking operates in Hong Kong and what a more effective response would look like.
In ZN v Secretary for Justice, Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal found that the Government's response to trafficking for forced labour had been "mainly a rhetorical manoeuvre" — a "patchwork of offences" that failed to guide investigation, identification, or protection in any meaningful way. The Court set the standard of "practical and effective protection" as the constitutional yardstick under Article 4 of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights.
In June 2025, the Court of Final Appeal returned to this question in CB v Commissioner of Police [2025] HKCFA 10. The Court settled what a remedy must look like where the police have failed to conduct an effective investigation into a credible trafficking claim — affirming ZN's "practical and effective protection" standard under Article 4 of the Bill of Rights, and giving it concrete content for the first time. The clinic instructed in both cases.
Despite the Government's subsequent steps — inter-departmental guidelines, training programmes, and action plans — the structural gap between Hong Kong's stated commitment to combating trafficking and its practical mechanisms for identifying and protecting victims has remained a live concern. Cases before the courts have continued to reveal victims who were prosecuted rather than protected, and asylum seekers whose trafficking indicators went unexamined at every stage of the process.
The three forms of trafficking the clinic sees in its casework — sexual exploitation, forced labour, and forced criminality — each expose different failures in the existing system. In cases of forced criminality in particular, asylum seekers have faced aggravated sentences for offences their traffickers coerced them to commit, without any formal mechanism to assess their status as potential victims.
The person in the dock may be the victim. The system rarely stops to ask.
The clinic works across three modes in this area: representing individuals, building the empirical record, and engaging in comparative legal analysis that places Hong Kong's approach in its broader regional context.
We represent individuals who may be victims of trafficking — in criminal proceedings, in immigration and non-refoulement processes, and in seeking access to support. We work alongside the NGOs who support these individuals, providing the legal input that complements their frontline work. All cases are handled with strict confidentiality and are supervised by practising lawyers.
Students conduct systematic reviews of published judgments, analyse patterns in casework, and engage in fieldwork with partner organisations. Our research is designed to produce evidence that is accurate, replicable, and usable in cases and litigation — not claims that outrun the record.
We examine how other jurisdictions — including Mainland China — approach human trafficking in law and in practice. Understanding what has and has not worked elsewhere is essential to making a serious case for what Hong Kong should do differently.
We work closely with NGOs in Hong Kong and internationally — connecting casework to the broader networks of support that clients need, and drawing on partner expertise to improve the quality of our research.
Students are trained in trauma-informed interviewing before engaging with clients in this area. Understanding the psychological dynamics of exploitation — and the reasons victims may minimise, conceal, or be unable to articulate their experience — is a prerequisite for doing this work well.
Research findings are used in written advocacy directed at government bodies and other stakeholders. We aim to be constructive — identifying specific, workable reforms rather than general criticism — and to ensure our submissions reflect the actual evidence rather than assumptions about it.
Each of these projects was co-led by students under close supervision. The work is shared here because the methodology and findings are sound — not to overclaim what is, in each case, an ongoing and carefully bounded inquiry.
No previous study based in Hong Kong has systematically compared the legal frameworks of Mainland China and the Hong Kong SAR as applied to trafficking in persons, using the Palermo Protocol as the analytical lens. This research does that — mapping how each jurisdiction covers the three core elements of act, means, and purpose, and identifying where each falls short.
The comparison is not straightforward. Both jurisdictions have significant gaps. Mainland China's Criminal Law, centred on Articles 240 and 244, provides a more unified framework than Hong Kong's dispersed ordinances — but Article 240 does not cover adult men, enforcement is uneven in practice, and victim identification among repatriated scam victims remains weak. Hong Kong's gaps are different in kind: they are structural, embedded in the legislative framework, and require legislative choices Hong Kong has so far declined to make.
Joint enforcement operations between Mainland and Hong Kong authorities — including 駕雲行動 (Operation Movecloud, 2021) and 金池行動 (Operation Jinchi, 2025) — demonstrate what coordinated cross-border action can achieve. They also demonstrate a consistent pattern: the same case that Mainland authorities treat as a trafficking matter is processed in Hong Kong as an immigration and public-order offence. The trafficking chain disappears into a different legal category.
Read the research →A systematic review of Hong Kong court judgments involving Tanzanian nationals, combined with regional news analysis and a new research partnership with a Tanzanian NGO, is beginning to reveal a consistent pattern: Tanzanian women recruited through offers of legitimate work, moved through regional hubs including Mainland China and Southeast Asia, and identified — if at all — only at the point of arrest rather than exploitation.
Hong Kong appears to be one node in a broader regional network. Understanding its role requires looking at the pattern across jurisdictions, not only at the cases that surface here.
Read the research →In research conducted within the clinic — distinct from the Government's own screening statistics — students reviewed the Reasons for Sentence and Verdict in 200 criminal cases in which asylum seekers were prosecuted in Hong Kong. Twenty-seven of those cases contained fact patterns demonstrating indicators consistent with trafficking: financial desperation, acting on instructions from a third party with misinformation about the task, and vulnerability to exploitation. In none of these cases was a formal trafficking assessment conducted.
This is the clinic's own empirical work, built from publicly available court records. The implications for how prosecutors, defence lawyers, and judges should approach cases involving asylum seeker defendants are significant. A fuller analysis is in preparation.
Publication forthcomingTrafficking cases demand more of students than doctrinal knowledge alone. Before engaging with any client or potential victim, students undergo training in trauma-informed interviewing — understanding how trauma affects memory and disclosure, how to build trust across difference, and how to ask questions that neither re-traumatise nor put words in a client's mouth.
The same rigour applies to research. Students are trained to build a record carefully — to distinguish what the evidence actually shows from what it might suggest, and to resist the temptation to overclaim findings that are preliminary or incomplete.
We recognise that some individuals who approach us may not have strong claims, or may be better served by a different path. Where our professional assessment is that a case is unlikely to succeed, we say so — clearly, and with care. We help clients understand why, and think through the alternatives available to them. Representation is not the same as advocacy at all costs.
"The law is the tool. The person is the point."
The clinic's work in this area depends on sustained partnerships with NGOs, frontline service providers, and research collaborators in Hong Kong and across the region. Referrals, expertise, and access to communities the law does not easily reach are all essential to what we do.