Hong Kong fights landmark maids residency ruling

Hong Kong's government has launched an appeal against a landmark court ruling which grants thousands of foreign maids the right to seek permanent residency in the southern banking hub. Government counsel David Pannick told the Court of Appeal the original ruling was mistaken as it restricted the authorities' ability to determine who can permanently reside in Hong Kong and who cannot. The High Court ruling on September 30 gave Filipina domestic worker Evangeline Banao Vallejos the right to request permanent residency status, something that had been denied to foreign maids until then. "It is our respectful submission that (this) decision was wrong as a matter of law," Pannick said at the outset of the hearing. He said the city authorities should be given some discretionary power to decide who was eligible for residency, rejecting arguments that restrictions on maids were unconstitutional and discriminatory. "There is no undermining of the rule of law if the legislature enjoys a certain margin of discretion," he told the court. Most foreigners can apply to stay in Hong Kong after seven years of uninterrupted residency, gaining access to voting rights, benefits such as public housing and the right to live in the Chinese city without a work visa. But that right had been denied to the city's 292,000 foreign maids, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, until Vallejos won her challenge last year. High Court Judge Johnson Lam ruled the law unconstitutional in a decision that sharply divided opinion in the city of seven million people. Officials warned it could open the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of residency requests from maids, some of whom have lived in the city for decades without access to residency status. Vallejos' lawyer, Mark Daly, said the 59-year-old mother-of-five has yet to be granted permanent residency due to the ongoing legal dispute. She has lived in Hong Kong since 1986. Filipino Migrant Workers' Union vice-chairman Eman Villanueva said the government was entitled to appeal but accused it of wanting to discriminate against foreign domestic workers. "On our part, it's disappointing not because the government is appealing but from the beginning they expressively said that foreign domestic helpers should not be given the same right," he told AFP outside the court. A small group of people protested at the court against the extension of residency rights to domestic workers. The hearing has been scheduled to run until Thursday.