Hong Kong apex court grants solicitor final appeal over jailed activist’s prison complaint

2026-01-25 - 21:07

Hong Kong’s top court has granted a solicitor a final bid to overturn her conviction over an unapproved complaint form she received from jailed activist Owen Chow, with a hearing scheduled for May. Lady Justice statue at the Court of Final Appeal. Photo: GovHK. Representing solicitor Phyllis Woo, barrister Steven Kwan appeared before a panel of three Court of Final Appeal judges – Roberto Ribeiro, Joseph Fok, and Johnson Lam – on Wednesday. He argued that it should have been legal to send the complaint form from jail to the Ombudsman even without approval from the Correctional Services Department (CSD), local media reported. Woo is challenging her conviction for bringing the complaint form out of the Lai Chi Kok detention centre on behalf of jailed pro-democracy activist Chow, whom she was representing at the time. Citing Hong Kong’s prison rules, Kwan said that the CSD superintendent “must permit the prisoner to write and send” a letter addressed to specified persons, including justices of the peace, the commissioner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and the Ombudsman. He added that sending out a complaint form was authorised “even in the absence of any approval by the CSD.” Meanwhile, the prosecution, also citing prison rules, said that documents must be authorised by a prison superintendent before they can be sent out. After hearing the submissions, the judges approved Woo’s application for leave to appeal and scheduled a hearing for May 27. Appeal bids Wednesday’s hearing came after the solicitor’s appeal at the Court of Appeal was previously shot down by High Court Judge Judianna Barnes, who also rejected her bid to take her case to the Court of Final Appeal in October. Owen Chow. Photo: Candice Chau/HKFP. Barnes said that Woo herself was not a “specified person” under the prison rules, even if the letter was meant for the Ombudsman. Woo then applied directly to the top court for leave to appeal. The solicitor was fined HK$1,800 in August 2024 after Principal Magistrate Ivy Chui found her and Chow guilty over the complaint form that Chow gave to Woo during a prison visit in May 2023. The solicitor took the letter out of the Lai Chi Kok detention centre and sent it to the Ombudsman, the government watchdog. In May last year, Judge Barnes rejected the pair’s appeals against their convictions, but quashed Chow’s three-day jail term and ordered him to pay a HK$1,800 fine instead.