Katherine Yan
- Jul 10, 2021

Refugees in HK

The definitions

A refugee is a person who is forced to flee their home country due to persecution, war, or violence, and cannot or should not be made to return.

An asylum seeker, on the other hand, is someone who seeks to claim legal protection and assistance as a refugee but hasn’t yet been recognised as one by their host country.

A torture claimant refers to a person who is claiming protection after coming from a country where they might be subject to torture. The distinction is significant, because while Hong Kong has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, it has signed the UN Convention against Torture, meaning that it cannot deport people to countries where they might face abuse—and therefore must grant them refugee status—but it has no such obligation to other asylum seekers.

Protection claimants encompass both torture claimants and those other types of asylum seekers.

Alright, so, what’s the deal?

As a protection claimant in Hong Kong, it isn’t easy to be granted asylum.

Firstly, you cannot apply for asylum while your visa is still valid, so an asylum seeker must overstay their visa and become an illegal immigrant and a criminal in the eyes of the law. After becoming eligible to apply for asylum there is paperwork to be completed, followed by around six weeks needed to process a Recognizance Document, which will then be used as identification. Only several weeks after that can they start the Unified Screening System and file a protection claim, a process known to take years.

In the past 11 years, almost 23,000 protection claims were made by people seeking asylum in Hong Kong. However, there have only been 231 substantiated claimants, i.e. 231 people granted refugee status. This is a 1% substantiation rate, far below the international average of 13%, and much further below the 20-38% expected in liberal, developed countries.

There are 13,000 protection claimants living within city limits, undergoing a continual process that is, by all measures, likely to fail. For these people, the Hong Kong Government has implemented a welfare scheme to provide subsidies for basic necessities, which would leave them better off than many countries, except for the fact that Hong Kong does not allow unsubstantiated claimants to work.

Subsidies provided

Most protection claimants are wholly reliant on the subsidies, and yet despite yearly inflation, these have remained the same since 2014. HK$40 a day for food from a prescribed list of allowed items, usually given in the form of vouchers or an e-card for a particular supermarket with limited choice and marked-up prices. HK$50 a week is given for transport, which means, more often than not, the primary mode of transportation is walking.

Housing, in particular, is limited to HK$1,500 a month and paid directly to the landlord. A mere HK$1,500, in a city where the average monthly rent for a 132-square-foot subdivided flat is HK$5,000. As a result of this, protection claimants are forced to try and find cramped housing in dangerous or remote areas, with the overwhelming majority reporting space or accessibility issues and many ending up on the streets.

The HK$1,500 does not cover furniture or utility costs. Furthermore, many people have trouble renting a space even if they could afford it, as they are faced with cultural and language barriers and widespread racial discrimination amongst landlords.

Problems & difficulties

Many call it impossible to subsist entirely on government subsidies. Is it any surprise, then, that when faced with the law versus the necessities of survival, some will turn to illegal work? To theft and crime?

Even people who scrape by legally are faced with years in limbo, forced to idle no matter what skills they possess. They are unable to work or volunteer or do much at all but wait for things outside of their control, to the obvious detriment of their mental health.

Additionally, legal assistance—the type required to help someone navigate the complexities of the law so they can stand a chance at being granted asylum—is almost impossible to attain without income. Only about 3% of legal aid applications submitted in 2018 were approved, leaving many reliant on the limited supply of pro-bono lawyers and charities. The legal proceedings themselves are far from transparent, too, and there are endless issues and complaints. In one case, 40% of the sources used by a review board to make their decision were Wikipedia pages; in another, the adjudicators apparently refused to adjourn a hearing despite the claimant suffering pregnancy-induced pain.

Stuck in the bureaucratic processes, protection claimants are without asylum, unable to work, and unable to leave. 29% of the asylum seekers in Hong Kong have been seeking protection for more than 9 years.

And at the end of it, even the 1% to be substantiated and granted refugee status aren’t free. For example, there’s no blanket permission to take up paid work, and applications have to be filed and considered individually, with a less than 50% approval rate.

What can I do to help?

There are multiple organisations and charities in Hong Kong dedicated to helping refugees, protection claimants, and other marginalised migrants in Hong Kong.