Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
Justice Johnson Lam Man-hon of the CFI had been expected to rule on the case on 29 September 2011. However, the Hong Kong Observatory raised tropical cyclone warning signal No. 8 due to the approach of Typhoon Nesat early that morning, meaning that government offices closed for the day. The next morning, the weather had returned to normal, and Lam announced his ruling that the relevant provision of the Immigration Ordinance was inconsistent with the Basic Law. Vallejos herself did not attend court that day, as she was at work.
Palace of Justice siege
On July 11, 2008, Virginia Vallejo, the television anchorwoman who was romantically involved with Pablo Escobar from 1983 to 1987 and author of (2007) (Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar), was asked to testify in the reopened case of the siege of the Palace of Justice, in order to confirm events that she had described in her memoir, in the chapter "That Palace in Flames", in pages 230 to 266. In the Colombian Consulate in Miami, under oath, she described the relationship of the drug lord with the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua and the M-19; also, a meeting of Escobar with the rebel commander Ivan Marino Ospina, in which she had been present, two weeks before the latter was killed by the Army, on August 28, 1985. In her judicial declaration, Vallejo confirmed how, in mid-1986, Escobar had told her that he had paid one million dollars in cash to the rebels, and another million in arms and explosives to steal his files from the Palace of Justice, before the Supreme Court began studying the extradition of the leading members of the cocaine cartels to the United States. During her testimony, that lasted five hours, the journalist described also photographs of sixteen bodies that she had received anonymously in that year. According to her, Escobar identified the victims as the employees of the cafeteria of the Palace and two rebel women that had been detained by the Army after the siege, and had been tortured and disappeared on orders of colonel Edilberto Sánchez, director of B-2, Military Intelligence. Though her testimony was protected under gag, several excerpts appeared on August 17, 2008 in "El Tiempo", the newspaper of the Santos' family, including the vice president Francisco Santos, and defense minister Juan Manuel Santos. On radio stations, Vallejo accused the office of the Colombian Attorney General of filtering it to the media and adulterating the contents, to protect the military and the former presidential candidate Alberto Santofimio, Escobar’s political ally. On June 3, 2010, Virginia Vallejo was granted political asylum in the United States of America.