Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
On 30 September 2011, Justice Johnson Lam of the Court of First Instance of the High Court (CFI) ruled in Vallejos' case that existing legislation restricting FDHs from qualifying for permanent residence contravened the Hong Kong Basic Law. Lam also found that Vallejos and Domingo, but not the three other applicants, had fulfilled the condition of taking Hong Kong as their only permanent home and being ordinarily resident in Hong Kong for seven years. The Court of Appeal of the High Court overturned the CFI's decision on Vallejos' case on 28 March 2012. Vallejos and Domingo then jointly appealed to the Court of Final Appeal (CFA), which heard their case on 26–28 February 2013; the CFA rejected their appeal on 25 March 2013.
Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
Elsie Leung also called on the government to seek an interpretation as soon as possible; based her knowledge of the Court of Final Appeal's reading of the Basic Law in prior cases going back to "Director of Immigration v. Chong Fung Yuen" in 2001, she did not expect that the government would be able to win its case in that venue. She further accused both the CFI and the CFA of ignoring the legislative intent of the Basic Law's drafters. On this point, University of Hong Kong law professor Albert Chen, also a member of the Basic Law Committee, noted that Lam had very little flexibility in how he could rule on "Vallejos" precisely due to CFA precedents in the "Chong Fung Yuen" case and other early right of abode cases. He stated that the CFA's reluctance to take into account extrinsic materials in determining the intent of Article 24 stemmed largely from the fact that the extrinsic materials available to the CFA regarding the intent of Article 24 were published after the Basic Law itself. As a solution, he suggested that, if Beijing made public the minutes from the negotiations leading up to the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which was the basis for the drafting of the Basic Law, it might persuade the CFA to re-examine its interpretation of Article 24; the Joint Declaration, being a treaty, was subject to principles of international law, under which signatories to a treaty had the right to issue explanations of their positions.