Hearings before the Torture Claims Appeal Board are private, and its decisions have traditionally gone unpublished. Since February 2025 that has changed: full Board decisions have become publicly accessible through the judicial review record. The clinic is studying what that corpus reveals — about how protection claims are decided, and about what publication itself exposes.
Clinic students audited, case by case, the Board decisions that have become publicly accessible through judicial review judgments — recording, for each, what kind of personal detail the published document carries.
The Board's process is built on an undertaking of confidentiality: hearings are held in private, and claimants disclose accounts of persecution, family circumstances, and flight on that understanding. When the full decision later becomes publicly accessible — appended to or linked from a judicial review judgment — that undertaking and the open-justice principle collide. Our research asks two questions at once: what do these decisions, read at scale, reveal about how Hong Kong decides protection claims — and what does their publication reveal about the people who brought them?
Working from the judicial review record, students catalogued each publicly accessible Board decision and coded the categories of identifying detail it contains. No individual case is described on this page, and the clinic does not link to the decisions themselves — the point of the research is that such material should be harder to reach, not easier.
What the coding records. For each decision: the hearing date and case reference, whether leave for judicial review was granted, the claimant's country of origin, whether minors are involved, and — centrally — the exposure risk factors present in the published text.
The recurring categories. Named family members in the country of origin, and where they live. Named aggressors — the very people a claimant fled. Home addresses and past places of residence. Amounts of debt owed, which can mark a person as a target. Religious and political affiliations. And, in a small number of cases, sexual orientation — published in respect of claimants from jurisdictions where that orientation is criminalised.
Why it matters. Claimants include survivors of violence and persecution. Details of this kind can make them — or their families at home — identifiable to precisely the actors they described to the Board in confidence. Publication of this material sits in tension with the confidentiality on which the screening system depends, and with Hong Kong's data-protection framework.
Publication has one research consequence the clinic can put to protective use: for the first time, the Board's reasoning can be studied systematically rather than anecdotally. The clinic is reviewing the full published corpus, with every recorded observation anchored to the decision text it comes from.
Early, provisional patterns. Across the published corpus, dismissals rest overwhelmingly on two grounds: the finding that the feared harm does not meet the applicable risk threshold, and adverse credibility findings — each present in the large majority of dismissals, frequently together. Recurring template language appears across decisions, concentrated rather than evenly spread. The clinic treats these early findings as hypothesis-generating; verification is underway.
Where this strand goes. Once verified, the review will support the analysis this page's title promises: demographic patterns among claimants, the grounds on which decisions turn, and the reasoning structure of published outcomes — the empirical footing for the clinic's broader work on the fairness of the screening system.
Publication of tribunal decisions serves open justice. The question is not whether decisions should ever be public, but in what form. Other common-law jurisdictions have answered it directly.
The United Kingdom. In the Immigration and Asylum Chamber, protection appeals are anonymised automatically: Presidential Guidance Note No 2 of 2022 directs that the appellant's name be removed from public documents — online listings, published decisions, hearing notices — with anonymity as the starting point, and the judge deciding whether to lift it. Judicial guidance on open justice likewise directs that disclosure decisions weigh the public interest against the sensitivity of particular evidence and the need for redaction.
The principle. Anonymised publication preserves everything open justice requires — the reasoning, the outcome, the ability to scrutinise the tribunal's work — while withholding the one thing that endangers people: identity. The clinic's own practice on this page models the same principle. Our research names no claimant, links to no decision, and reports patterns only in aggregate.
Everything in this research derives from documents already in the public domain — judicial review judgments and the Board decisions accessible through them. The clinic imposes on itself the standard it advocates: identifying detail is retained for analysis but appears in no public output, and this page reports categories and aggregates, never cases. Figures are treated as provisional until verification is complete.
Student teams conducted the publication audit as clinic coursework — case-by-case document review, structured coding of exposure risk factors, and per-cohort analysis — under supervision, with findings synthesised across teams.