Small-house rights of Hong Kong male villagers fully restored after Court of Appeal reverses earlier ruling
- Landmark case centres on policy from 1970s, entitling indigenous men to build a home in their New Territories village
- Court of Appeal overturns earlier ruling that the right was only applicable to private rather than government land
Appeal judges have overturned a lower court ruling to reinstate male indigenous villagers’ full rights to build three-storey homes on both private and government-sourced land in space-starved Hong Kong.
The Court of Appeal ruled on Wednesday that the small-house policy based on New Territories villagers’ so-called ding right was “constitutional in its entirety”, allowing them to continue building houses not just on land they owned, but also on plots swapped with, or granted by, the government.
A High Court ruling in 2019 on the policy had stripped them of the right to exercise those exclusive privileges on public land.
The latest 69-page judgment, penned by Chief Judge of the High Court Mr Justice Jeremy Poon Shiu-chor, concluded that the practice of granting public land to villagers to build homes could be traced back to the early 20th century, and the ding right fell “within the indigenous villagers’ lawful traditional rights and interests entitling them to the constitutional protection in full, despite their inherently discriminatory nature” on grounds of sex, birth or social origin.
Ding refers to male offspring in Chinese and is used to denote exclusiveness to indigenous men.
The judge also noted in ruling that the initial legal challenge, mounted four decades after the policy was put in place, was “seriously delayed” and had caused prejudice not only to villagers expecting to build a house, but to land administrators as well.