Human Rights Tribunal dismisses law student’s complaint against TMU law school
This article is more than 2 years old
This article is more than 2 years old
A law student who complained to the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Commission (HKHRCD) about a visit to an international education programme at one of the city’s leading law schools has been criticised by the international organisation for failing to follow the correct procedure for lodging a complaint.
The commission has asked law school officials to “immediately and fully investigate” the complaint and take “appropriate disciplinary action” against the student before making a determination about whether the visit breached Hong Kong’s Basic Law on the protection of personal data.
Karen Lee, a first-year student of the university’s Hong Kong and New Territories Law School (HKTLS), said she was subjected to inappropriate sexual and aggressive behaviour during a visit to the law school’s International Human Rights Law and Policy Institute, organised by the School for International and Public Affairs, and a non-governmental organisation under its remit.
The student said she had no prior experience of travelling overseas to attend seminars, and felt “deceived” and “disrespected”. She claims that the host law school arranged the trip “without my consent”, and had no prior knowledge of its content or the content of the programmes at the university’s Law School and at other “western” universities it had arranged.
Lee said she had decided to complain about the two-week trip, and had made her concerns known to the HKHRCD, which had conducted interviews with the student and her parents. The commission’s investigation found that the student had not taken sufficient precautions to verify the information she had provided accurately, and had failed to identify a conflict of interest with the host university. The commission ordered the host law school to make a public statement