Wally Yeung

Yeung was one of the pioneers of judicial bilingualism in Hong Kong: in the December 1995 case Sun Er-jo v. Lo Ching & Ors, Case No. 3283/1995, he was the first High Court judge to conduct a civil hearing using Cantonese as the language of the courtroom, and the first to use written Chinese to deliver a judgment.[16]

A more controversial ruling of Yeung's was R. v Tam Yuk-ha, HCMA 933/1996. Tam had placed a table on the pavement outside her store, and was prosecuted for making an unauthorised "addition" to her premises after having been granted a licence, contrary to Food Business (Urban Council) By-Laws (Cap. 132Y) § 35(a). Yeung overturned the magistrate's ruling of guilt because the Chinese version of the by-law, unlike the English version, did not prohibit "additions" in general but only "building additional construction or building works" (his back-translation of the term "增建工程" used in the Chinese version), and in the event of inability to reconcile the two equally authentic versions of the by-law, he was obligated to choose the interpretation which favoured the defendant.[17] In HKSAR v Tam Yuk-ha, HCMA 1385/1996, the Court of Appeal overturned Yeung's ruling and reinstated Tam's conviction on the grounds that the term in question did not merely refer to "construction" but any "erection" of additional works.[18]

Yeung would go on to become the chairman of the Subcommittee on the Translation of Case Precedents, which oversaw a three-month pilot project from January to April 1999 to produce Chinese translations of twenty-five judgments of precedential value identified by the Judiciary, the Bar Association, the Law Society, and the Department of Justice.[16]

On 17 August 2017, Yeung and two other judges of the Court of Appeal, Derek Pang and Jeremy Poon, sentenced the three main leaders in the 2014 Hong Kong protests, Joshua Wong, Alex Chow, and Nathan Law, to six to eight months in prison in the case of Secretary for Justice v. Wong Chi Fung and others, CAAR 4/2016; the trio had stormed a fenced-off government forecourt known as "Civic Square" which triggered the 79-day Occupy protests. The ruling sparked widespread fear over Hong Kong's judicial independence, as the Court of Appeal overturned the more lenient sentence of the Court of First Instance after the government pushed for harsher punishments.[19]

Yeung was criticised for his strong words in the judgement, in which he observed that "in recent years, an unhealthy wind has been blowing in Hong Kong." He said: "Some people, on the pretext of pursuing their ideals or freely exercising their rights conferred by law, have acted wantonly in an unlawful manner. Not only do they refuse to admit their law-breaking activities are wrong, but they even go as far as regarding such activities as a source of honour and pride."[19] While supportive of the judge's ruling, former Hong Kong Bar Association chairman Paul Shieh said his comments were "a bit emotionally charged and not often seen" in a common law ruling.[20] It was later reported that Yeung had previously attended a cocktail party held by the anti-Occupy Small and Medium Enterprises Law Firm Association of Hong Kong; his impartiality was thus questioned by legislator Dennis Kwok.[21]

In 1999, Yeung heard a major judicial review case relating to the right of abode in Hong Kong, Lau Kong-yung & Ors v. Director of Immigration, HCAL 20/1999. He found that the seventeen mainland-born applicants were not entitled to the right of abode by virtue of their parents' Hong Kong permanent resident status until they had obtained Certificates of Entitlement, and thus refused to overturn the removal order issued against them by the Director of Immigration.[22]