SOJOBI, AKPEVWE JOYCE v. Ms WONG WING SZE (THE PRINCIPAL, YAUMATI KAIFONG ASSOCIATION SCHOOL) AND OTHERS

DCCJ 5329/2025

[2026] HKDC 1566

IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

CIVIL ACTION NO 5329 OF 2025

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DECISION

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INTRODUCTION

1.  By a decision handed down on 24 April 2026 (“the Decision”), this Court dismissed P’s[1] appeal against the Order made by Master Minnie Wong on 22 January 2026 and ordered P to pay Ds’ costs of the appeal, which were summarily assessed at HK$7,000 (in favour of D1/D2) and HK$6,000 (in favour of D3).

2.  P took out a summons on 6 May 2026 (“the Summons”) seeking leave to appeal against the Decision. On 27 May 2026, I directed paper disposal for this leave application without an oral hearing; parties have followed my directions to lodge skeleton submissions and statements of costs.

3.  The legal principles concerning an application for leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal are trite. For leave to appeal to be granted, this Court has to be satisfied that the appeal has a “reasonable prospect of success” or there is some other reason in the “interests of justice” for the appeal to be heard; see s.63A(2) of the District Court Ordinance (Cap.336).

4.  A “reasonable prospect of success” must be more than fanciful, but needs not be shown to be probable (see SMSE v KL [2009] 4 HKLRD 125 at §17). The burden lies on the leave applicant to satisfy the Court that this statutory criterion is met (see Chan Wai Hing v MTR Corporation Ltd [2018] HKDC 586 at §2). The application should be assessed by reference to properly formulated proposed grounds of appeal. The proposed grounds must disclose a genuine error in the decision being challenged and are not merely disagreements with the decision’s outcome.

5.  In relation to the “interests of justice” limb, the Court may grant leave if the question involved in the appeal is one about general principle, decided for the first time or of such importance that further argument and a decision of the Court of Appeal would be to the public advantage (see Hong Kong Civil Procedure 2026, para 59/2A/4).

GROUNDS OF APPEAL

6.  From a reading of the Summons, P’s supporting affidavit and the written submissions lodged by her, it seems to me that P’s grounds of appeal against the Decision can be broadly summarised as follows: -

(1)  This Court ignored, sidestepped or failed to address the specific reliefs sought by P. This, said P, was an abdication of my judicial duty;

(2)  This Court acted as an advisor to Ds but not a neutral adjudicator, and was therefore in breach of my duty of impartiality;

(3)  This Court committed material irregularity and was in breach of principles of natural justice by focusing on matters which were outside the scope of the pleadings and evidence of the case;

(4)  This Court has violated P’s fundamental/constitutional rights by encouraging Ds to file second affidavit instead of ruling on the appeal.

OVERALL COMMENT OF P’S PAPERS

7.  P’s documents show that she does not understand the nature of her own appeal to this Court from the Order of Master Wong, and P simply does not remember what she told the Court in the appeal hearing on 2 April 2026.

8.  P’s appeal from Master Wong, as analyzed in the Decision, was a costs-only appeal. This Court did not arrive at this understanding just from a plain reading of P’s NoA against the Order of Master Wong. This Court gave ample opportunity to P in the oral hearing on 2 April 2026 for her to explain what she wanted to achieve through the appeal; see paragraphs 29-32 of the Decision.

9.  Simply put, P sought to overturn an order of costs against her, but at the end she failed to persuade me that the learned Master’s discretion on costs was exercised erroneously or unreasonably. The appeal was thus dismissed, and the reasons in the Decision are not repeated herein. P’s own framing of the NoA, plus the positions taken by her in the oral hearing, confined the scope of the dispute before me to this costs matter.

10.  Accordingly, it was not open to me to address any substantive reliefs pleaded in the SoC, let alone granting them. Those reliefs were not the subject of the appeal or the Decision. This limit of scope was particularly necessary in this case because Ds’ striking-out application against the SoC had been fixed for hearing by another judicial officer on a future date when I seized P’s appeal against the Order of Master Wong on 2 April 2026.

11.  Probably by reason of the same mistaken belief about the scope of the appeal seized by this Court and the Decision, P went into numerous legal matters which might be related to her substantive causes of action in the SoC (e.g. authorities about duty of care in tort). I cannot see the relevance of those submissions/authorities to the costs-only appeal, the Decision and this leave to appeal application against the Decision.

12.  Overall speaking, I accept the position stated in Ds’ written submission that P has advanced only bare or irrelevant allegations without identifying or referring to any specific paragraph of the Decision which are alleged to be erroneous in law. This alone is sufficient for me to dismiss this leave application.

DECISION ON EACH OF THE GROUNDS OF APPEAL

13.  But for completeness’s sake, I will still go through each of the proposed grounds of appeal.

14.  Ground (1) stems from the aforesaid misunderstanding about the nature of the appeal from Master Wong to this Court. I did not abdicate my judicial duty. The judicial duty to examine whether the claims and reliefs in the SoC are established was not assigned to me. The scope of my duty actually arose from how P framed the interlocutory summons placed before Master Wong, how she framed the NoA from Master Wong and what she said in the appeal hearing on 2 April 2026.  

15.  Grounds (2) and (4) have no substance. I did not serve as an advisor to Ds at all; neither did I advise Ds to file any second affidavit. In fact, I made the Decision just on the basis of the documents available to me in the oral hearing on 2 April 2026. I did not direct or even read any additional document before I handed down the Decision on 24 April 2026. P cannot make those unfounded allegations without properly identifying any particulars of apparent bias and supporting evidence.

16.  For the purpose of this leave application, no transcript of the hearing on 2 April 2026 was produced to me. If there is a transcript for an objective bystander to read, or the relevant audio recording is independently heard by the bystander, I am confident that he or she will come to the view that sufficient opportunity was given to P to express herself, there was a fair hearing and at no point did I demonstrate any bias in the process. P just disagrees with the outcome of the Decision, but the disagreement cannot be escalated to an allegation against impartiality without any reasonable foundation.    

17.  On Ground (3), P repeatedly said I had diverted attention from P’s case to collateral matters outside the pleadings and evidence, but there is no elaboration as to how. The matter before me was about Master Wong’s costs order. To understand how Master Wong came to her costs order, I needed to examine the SoC to understand the nature of the proceedings; I also needed to examine the summons and affirmations to understand the nature of the interlocutory application before the learned Master and the parties’ positions to it. I am not sure if “matters outside pleadings and evidence” refer to information about the related judicial review proceedings, which were stated in paragraphs 30-31 of the Decision. However, P was the first one to relate such information to this Court; she mentioned it to explain why the “Transfer Request” (defined in paragraph 12 of the Decision), the original subject matter of the interlocutory application before Master Wong, was no longer pursued. There is no reason why this Court should not take the information into account.

CONCLUSION AND COSTS

18.  None of the proposed grounds of appeal has any reasonable prospect of success; neither is there any “interests of justice” for the proposed appeal to be heard such as any public advantage in getting a particular area of law clarified.

19.  The Summons is dismissed with costs. I order that P should pay Ds the costs of this leave application (on top of those costs awarded in favour of Ds by Master Wong and by this Court vide the Decision). Having considered P’s grounds of objections to Ds’ statements of costs, D1/D2’s costs are summarily assessed at HK$15,000, whereas D3’s costs are summarily assessed at HK$4,000.