Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
Vallejos and Daniel Domingo appealed their cases to the Court of Final Appeal, and were respectively assigned the case numbers FACV 19 and 20/2012. They would be represented before the CFA by Michael Fordham; David Pannick continued to represent the Government. Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma rejected a further application for joinder by eight-year-old Liang Wing-ki, the Hong Kong-born daughter of mainland parents, whose next friend, mother Li Yinxian, filed suit on her behalf. Philip Dykes, for the applicant, argued that because Vallejos and Domingo's case would touch on issues of interpretation of the Basic Law under Article 158, Liang's interests would also be affected. In rejecting Liang's application, Ma stated: "We feel that the points you seem to argue are adequately covered and will be adequately covered". Liang and other Hong Kong-born children like her were ruled to be entitled to the right of abode in Hong Kong in the 2001 case "Director of Immigration v. Chong Fung Yuen".
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.