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What is the deal if you help out a charity on a volunteer basis whilst holding a visitor visa in Hong Kong?

Volunteer work for a charity based overseas but also operating in HK?

QUESTION

Hi Visa Geeza,

I am  Canadian and I first came to Hong Kong on April under a 3 month training visa as part of a university program.

While doing my training (an internship) I met the director of an NGO that is both a registered charity in Hong Kong and a registered non-profit in Vancouver.

I ended up volunteering for the NGO after my internship for about 4.5 months while looking for a job in Hong Kong.

I volunteered for the Vancouver branch of the NGO doing remote work such as emails and social media, basically stuff that can be done anywhere.

I was a visitor in Hong Kong at the time and also traveling in Asia.

Is it considered legal for me to work for this Canadian NGO while I was in Hong Kong?

Basically I was doing remote work  as a Canadian for a Canadian organization.

I just happened to be  doing it on my laptop in coffee shops in Hong Kong.

Hoping you can help me!

ANSWER

This is one of those hazy situations where you’re caught between two pillars, where it is almost impossible to anticipate any kind of sensible resolution to the dilemma that you’re facing. It is quite clear under Hong Kong law that you are not allowed to take up any kind of employment in Hong Kong, paid or unpaid, without the permission of the director of immigration.

So even when you’re in a situation where you’re volunteering your time, therefore conceptually need to make an application to the Immigration Department for their permission, or at the very least, a statement of no objection to you engaging in a specified activity. The problem is that because you’re working on a volunteer basis for an NGO, it’s highly unlikely that you would have all the necessary approval criteria in play that would allow the Immigration Department to positively consider an application and go on to approve it.

Therefore, it kind of begs the question that if the Immigration Department is telling you on the one hand you need their permission, but on the other, the operating criteria for the grant of permission to be able to do that isn’t available. Because this would be such a strange situation, the Immigration Department won’t really know how to deal with it.

You’d find that your application would probably not get entertained in any meaningful sense to the extent that you could get a positive resolution within the short time span that you’d expect to stay in Hong Kong as a visitor. And, there lies the rub, because this is really all about what you are doing as a visitor in Hong Kong rather than work per se.

And, as you would expect that your visit time in Hong Kong would come to an end quite soon. If you are generally helping out remotely and you are doing some things, as you suggest, in a coffee shop at the end of a computer, would the Immigration Department find that unreasonable?

Would they object to it? Would they want to prosecute you for breach of conditions of stay? I can’t speak for the Immigration Department on what they would do, obviously, but in my experience, it just seems to me that they would probably, expect to see you leave Hong Kong and take that activity elsewhere without putting the resources to waste in trying to prove some sort of point as to what is permitted and what is not permitted activity under the visitor visa category, when clearly doing some things that are of good to both the canadian organisation and to the Hong Kong organisation, far be it from me to say that what you’re doing is lawful I would never be able to say that to you.

But by the same token, would the Immigration Department take you to task for any of this? And would they engage resources to look into providing you with express permissions, given that as a canadian citizen, you’re only going to be getting 90 days here as a visitor anyway?

I suspect nothing, really a case of, I would say, let sleeping dogs lie. But understand that the visitor visa is designed for you to come and visit. It’s not for you to engage in any kind of employment activity, irrespective of where the recipient of the contribution that you’re making to their fortunes is located.

So, sorry, a bit of a convoluted kind of non-answer to a question that I think doesn’t really have a straightforward answer, all told. But good luck nonetheless.

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