An appeal for the government to process asylum seekers, which took the Court of Appeal more than 17 months to rule on, ended in a dismissal yesterday.
Asylum seekers currently either seek refugee status from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or they apply to the Immigration Department for classification as genuine torture claimants.
This system of two separate processes to determine who should or should not be given protection, has been criticised for years.
Yesterday's judgment left the status quo unchanged.
The judgment said Hong Kong's domestic laws explicitly overrode recognised international norms of not returning asylum seekers to their countries. This meant that the government can continue to reject taking responsibility for screening asylum seekers.
The case concerns six asylum seekers from Africa and South Asia, whose claims were rejected by the UNHCR. The government says there are 6,700 torture claimants here, while the UNHCR says there are 535 asylum seekers. Many claimants apply for protection through both processes.
The Law Society, Bar Association and the UNHCR are critical of the current dual-track system, and are advocating a single system that is run by the government. The current system allows fraudulent claimants to stall for time by applying through one of the processes after they are rejected by the other. Meanwhile, the genuinely vulnerable claimants have to wait for years for their application to be processed.