Re Alam Mohammad

CACV 169/2020

[2021] HKCA 800

IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

COURT OF APPEAL

CIVIL APPEAL NO 169 OF 2020

(ON APPEAL FROM HCAL NO 1516 OF 2018)

____________________

____________________

Before:  Hon Cheung, Barma and Au JJA in Court

Date of Written Submissions:  30 December 2020

Date of Judgment:  4 June 2021

_______________

J U D G M E N T

_______________

Hon Au JA (giving the Judgment of the Court):

1.On 16 December 2020, the applicant filed a Notice of Motion to apply for leave to appeal to the Court of Final Appeal against this Court’s (Cheung and Au JJA) judgment of 19 November 2020 (“the Judgment”) [2020] HKCA 944. In the Judgment, we dismissed the applicant’s appeal against the decision of Deputy High Court Judge Bruno Chan dated 8 June 2020 dismissing his application for leave to apply for judicial review.

2.The facts and issues in the appeal, as well as the Court’s reasons for dismissing it, are set out in the Judgment.  We will not repeat them here.  After reviewing the Notice of Motion, we see no reason to deviate from the usual practice to consider this application on papers pursuant to paragraph 3 of Practice Direction 2.1.

3.Section 22(1)(b) of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal Ordinance (Cap 484) provides that an appeal shall lie to the Court of Final Appeal (“CFA”) at the discretion of this Court or the CFA if the question involved in the appeal is one which, by reason of its great general or public importance, or otherwise, ought to be submitted to the CFA for decision.

4.In his Notice of Motion, the applicant raised the following grounds of appeal:

“I would like to inform the Honourable Court that there is some error in law in my decision. Decision maker just relied on COI Information and my previous facts which were in favor while rejecting my claim. Acual life occur different situation then what is mentioned in COL Information. The Officer and cours prefers to ignore the overwhelming of the evidence of this violence towards minorities searching for unrealistic silver lining. The Decision is betrary a bias and formula approach unlikely fairly access the danger of my life and clearly not reasonable.” [sic]

5.In his skeleton submissions of 30 December 2020 filed pursuant to the Court’s directions, the applicant repeated the grounds in the supplemental notice of appeal he advanced before us, which were summarized at [14] of the Judgment.  These were rejected by us at [22] ‑ [24] of the Judgment.  The applicant fails to pinpoint any specific errors in our reasons.  The rest of the grounds relating to section 37ZT of the Immigration Ordinance (Cap 115) about the late filing of notice of appeal before the Torture Claims Appeal Board has no relevancy in this appeal and the applicant did not explain how it assisted his case.

6.In our view, the applicant’s application is totally without merits.  The matters raised in the Notice of Motion and written submissions fail to pinpoint any specific error in the Judgment.

7.In the circumstances and in any event, we also do not consider that there is any question of great general or public importance or which otherwise ought to be submitted to the CFA for determination.

8.For these reasons, we refuse to grant leave to appeal to the CFA, and dismiss the applicant’s Notice of Motion.

The applicant acting in person