Wally Yeung

Positions

Yeung was called to the Hong Kong Bar in 1976. He was in private practice for a decade after that, and was thereafter appointed a Magistrate in 1986, a District Court judge in 1987, and in 1995 a judge of the High Court of Justice (known as the Court of First Instance after the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997). He became a Justice of the Court of Appeal from 6 May 2002, along with fellow Court of First Instance judge Maria Yuen.

In 2007, Yeung took over as chairman of the commission of inquiry investigating alleged government interference into academic freedom at the Hong Kong Institute of Education after Justice Woo Kwok-hing recused himself to avoid the appearance of partiality; Yeung was chosen because, unlike Woo, he was not acquainted with either Arthur Li or Fanny Law.

Yeung was promoted to Vice-President of the Court of Appeal from 25 July 2011.

Legal bilingualism

Yeung was one of the pioneers of judicial bilingualism in Hong Kong: in the December 1995 case Sun Er-jo v Lo Ching and others, 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.

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. 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, but this was widely seen as far-fetched.

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.

Occupy sentence

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 over the Secretary for Justice v. Wong Chi Fung and others, CAAR 4/2016, for storming a fenced-off government forecourt known as "Civic Square" which triggered the 79-day Occupy protests. The sentence 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.

Yeung was criticised for his strong words in the judgement, "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." Despite supporting the Justice'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. Yeung was later found out by the media that he had attended a cocktail party of the anti-Occupy Small and Medium Enterprises Law Firm Association of Hong Kong. Yeung's impartiality was thus questioned by the Civic Party barrister and legislator Dennis Kwok.

Others

In 1999, Yeung heard a major judicial review case relating to the right of abode in Hong Kong, Lau Kong-yung and others 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 against them by the Director of Immigration.

Another widely noted case of his was Cheng Yin-fong v Wah Kee Vegetables and on Ting Newspapers, HCA 5970/1999, in which the plaintiff alleged sexual harassment by three men in On Ting Estate who used Cantonese profanity towards her after she confronted them for working shirtless; Yeung found no legal grounds to support Cheng's claim, noting that the men's shirtlessness was due to the high temperature conditions of their workplaces and that their foul language did not constitute a sexual request.

Personal life

Yeung was born in Hong Kong. He graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor of Laws in 1974, and obtained his Professional Certification in Laws from the same university the following year. He is married to Rechelle, with whom he has a son Yeung Jun-wei (楊浚瑋, born 1987). Yeung and his family are aficionados of table tennis, and Jun-wei hopes either to follow his father into the legal profession or to become a professional table tennis player. Yeung has a positive attitude towards his son's table tennis ambitions and finds time to attend all of his matches, and the Hang Seng Table Tennis Academy voted him and his wife the organisation's most supportive family.