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One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with the Hong Kong Immigration Department is the almost total lack of visibility on why applications get refused. No more so when it relates to a ‘limited purpose’ application for a visa to visit Hong Kong.

QUESTION

Hi

I applied for my customer a visitor visa who is a Pakistani passport holder, which has been refused. How do I obtain information or minutes, reason etc from Hong Kong Immigration. I understand there is a way we can ask them, if it could be advised.

Thanks with appreciation. 

ANSWER

When it comes to appealing the decision of the Immigration Department to refuse an application for a visitor visa, your options are extremely limited. There’s certainly no formal avenue of appeal. Effectively, what you need to do is to try to ascertain, as best you can the reason for the Immigration Department’s refusal and then submit a second application that squarely addresses the shortcomings that you believe have led to the department’s refusal in the first place.

The problem is that, of course, the Immigration Department is a division of the security branch, so they exercise their responsibilities in light of the security of Hong Kong; and for the last several years, Pakistani nationals have routinely struggled to secure immigration status in Hong Kong, not least the visitor visas, because there has been many, many instances previously of Afghan nationals traveling internationally on fake Pakistani passports.

And, for all practical purposes, Immigration Department don’t have the ability to assess the quality of the travel documents at the point of the issue of the visit visa; so in the main, they tend to err on the side of caution and unless the applicant has got a significant track record of prior visits to Hong Kong on a trouble free basis, or he, through the provision of documentation in the application, can manifestly demonstrate that there is a significant applicant in question, a wealthy applicant, very successful businessperson or something that, on the face of the application, allows the Immigration Department to conclude that there would be no risk of overstay or no risk of security concerns during the time that applicant was in Hong Kong. Then you can expect Immigration epartment to say no rather than yes. So I wouldn’t be too surprised by the fact of the refusal. It does happen and I’ve certainly seen it.

Now, turning to the issue of being able to secure the necessary information to have another run – the first point of call is to call the Immigration officer who’s responsible for notifying you of the refusal and quietly sort of, you know, ask him as to what problems they had with the application to see if there’s any shortcomings that the applicant and with your support can address so that the second application might meet with a different outcome.

Failing that, or indeed supporting that, you’ve got the opportunity to request information under personal data privacy ordinance and also under the government code of access to information, the links to which I’ve set out in the post, there are specific preclusions as to what the immigration department will release under the code.

Whatever papers that you get from them, you can expect to be significantly redacted, so as to protect the Immigration Department’s internal policy and deliberations over the application so you can get a sense for what might be wrong with it. Will it tell you definitively in terms of, yes, the reason we refuse is this, no, you’re not going to get that information. At best, it’s going to allow you to make an informed decision about whether you genuinely feel that there’s a chance of getting this refusal effectively overturned on the subsequent application. But again, because we’re talking about a visitor to Hong Kong, this person has no rights, absolutely no rights whatsoever.

The Immigration Department will exercise their discretion, as they see fit to best protect the interests of Hong Kong as a whole, and their sense is that, well, occasionally, if the interests of an individual applicant or their supporter or sponsor in Hong Kong are not being fully reflected or represented in the decision that they make, then actually it’s just a case from their perspective of it just being a casualty of the implementation of a policy that, as I said, is designed to protect Hong Kong.

So it’s unfortunate but you do have the opportunity to have another go at it. The door isn’t closed, as I say. The two pieces of law that I’ve detailed in the post that answers this question, will give you the next steps, approach to what’s going on. But in my experience, I wouldn’t be too excited about the possibility of getting the refusal all the time. It’s just unfortunate that Pakistan is where Pakistan is now geopolitically and with the security concerns. The Immigration Department has been indeed very tough about these nationals.

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