The clinic's research is not separate from its casework. It grows out of the patterns we see in client files, the questions raised by published judgments, and the gaps between what the law on paper provides and what the law in practice delivers. The work below is the public face of that effort.
Three published research showcases. Each pairs legal analysis with empirical method, and each is designed to be useful to the lawyers, policy-makers, and NGO partners working on these issues day-to-day.
Hong Kong's immigration detention estate, costed. Drawing on Security Bureau Finance Committee papers, Immigration Department responses to Access to Information requests, and the public budget — the daily cost per detainee at Castle Peak Bay rose 149% between 2016–17 and 2022–23. The analysis traces the fiscal expansion alongside the legal framework, with full reference to the substantial research published by Professor Surabhi Chopra.
Measured against the Palermo Protocol's three elements — act, means, and purpose of exploitation — Mainland China's Criminal Law covers the act and means of trafficking more coherently than Hong Kong's dispersed ordinances. Both jurisdictions have gaps: Article 240 uses "purpose of selling" rather than "purpose of exploitation," and excludes adult men; Hong Kong lacks a unified definitional framework altogether. The lessons for Hong Kong are about legislative design, not wholesale adoption of any single model.
A systematic review of 19 published Hong Kong judgments involving Tanzanian nationals, paired with the clinic's own anonymised case files and partner-organisation referrals. Across roughly a decade of court records, recurring fact patterns emerge — recruitment, transport, exploitation — that are consistent with trafficking but rarely identified as such within the criminal process. The showcase maps the recruitment–transit–arrival circuit and traces where the trafficking lens is, and is not, applied.
Research projects underway in the clinic. We list them here so that the work is visible before publication, and so that readers can see the shape of the broader programme.
Frontline interviews paired with doctrinal analysis of the leading authorities on healthcare entitlements for non-refoulement claimants — including Jumiati v Hospital Authority [2025] HKCFI 481 and Fok Chun Wa v Hospital Authority. The entitlement is equal in law. The barriers to realising it — language, fear, institutional discrimination, lack of information — are not.
Since February 2025, more than 3,400 Torture Claims Appeal Board decisions have been published by the Judiciary as attachments to judicial review decisions. Clinic students audited what those published decisions expose about the people who brought them, while the clinic reviews the full corpus at scale. Early patterns in dismissal reasoning, the categories of identifying detail publication carries, and the comparative case for anonymised publication.
A study of deaths among non-refoulement claimants in Hong Kong, drawing on publicly available records and fieldwork. The findings raise questions about the adequacy of care and support available to claimants throughout the process, and about how deaths in this population are recorded and responded to by public authorities.
Distinct from the Government's screening statistics, the clinic reviewed Reasons for Sentence and Verdict in 200 criminal cases in which asylum seekers were prosecuted in Hong Kong. Twenty-seven contained fact patterns demonstrating trafficking indicators — financial desperation, instructions from a third party with misinformation about the task, vulnerability to exploitation. In none of the 27 was a formal trafficking assessment conducted.
Each piece of research grows from a practice area. Click through to see the casework that the research sits alongside.
Detention costs · healthcare access · TCAB decision patterns · mortality study.
Mainland/HK comparison · Tanzanian-national pattern review · 200-case review.
The Conditional Discharge guides · the CD app · section 42B framework analysis.
The Hospital Authority advocacy letter · partner casework with HKDI and Pathfinders.
Direct support cases · injunction work · evidence-gathering with public agencies.