Institute for Migrant Rights
Railway line at Cianjur station, c. 1890 · KITLV, CC BY 4.0

Migration Jurisprudence from the South › Hong Kong

Lubiano v. Director of Immigration

Court of Appeal, Hong Kong · Hong Kong · 2020-09-21 · National court

Citation: CACV 112/2018, on appeal from [2018] HKCFI 331
Type of case: Constitutional and human rights
Outcome: Decided against the migrant side

Question

Is the rule that foreign domestic helpers must live in their employer’s home lawful?

What the court decided

Yes. The Director of Immigration may impose the live-in condition; the Court of Appeal held it falls within Hong Kong’s reservation to Article 6 of the ICESCR and does not itself force helpers to work on rest days.

In plain language

A domestic worker challenged the rule that helpers must live with their employers, saying it leads to very long hours. Both courts said the government may keep the rule.

Dalam bahasa sederhana

Seorang pekerja rumah tangga menggugat aturan wajib tinggal bersama majikan, karena aturan itu membuat jam kerja sangat panjang. Kedua pengadilan menyatakan pemerintah boleh mempertahankan aturan itu.

Pertanyaan: Apakah aturan bahwa pekerja rumah tangga asing wajib tinggal di rumah majikan itu sah?

What happened afterwards

  • 2018-02-14: Court of First Instance dismisses the challenge.
  • 2020-09-21: Court of Appeal dismisses the appeal. Rule unchanged.

Sources

Open this decision in the interactive collection (compare, filter, Indonesian view, downloads).

Cite as: Institute for Migrant Rights (2026), Migration Jurisprudence from the South, version 0.1, https://theimr.org/court-decisions/d/lubiano-2020/. This page summarizes a court decision for research and advocacy; it is not legal advice.

For researchers

This collection of decisions is built for empirical legal scholarship and socio-legal research on migration and the rights of migrant workers, as well as for advocacy.

The coded variables support statistical analysis in law: cross-national comparison, regression and event-history designs, and law and economics questions such as how recruitment fees, wage protection and limits on changing employer affect migrant workers. The data can be downloaded for replication.

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