Speaker

WONG, Stephen Kai-yi

Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data,
Hong Kong

Mr Stephen Wong joined the Attorney General’s Chambers of the Hong Kong Government as a Crown Counsel in 1986. In 1991, he was seconded to the UN Human Rights Committee based in Geneva. In 1992, he became the Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions. From 1996 to 2014, he assumed the offices of Deputy Solicitor-General; Founding Director of Berlin Economic and Trade Office; and Secretary-General of the Hong Kong Law Reform Commission, responsible for human rights (including reporting to UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies), cross-boundary legal affairs, Constitutional law issues, legal policies, economic and trade affairs (Central and Eastern Europe), and law reform. His fields of legal practice also include commercial law, arbitration law, intellectual property and criminal law. He is also active in community work, having been appointed as adjunct professor of the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong; advocacy examiner of the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong; director of the City Contemporary Dance Company and scout leader. He graduated from the University of Hong Kong, holding an LLM from the London School of Economics as well. Moreover, he has pursued management courses at Harvard and Wharton in the United States. Mr Wong was appointed as the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data of Hong Kong in August 2015, having been in private practice as a barrister-at-law, specialising in public law. On top of overseeing a fair enforcement of data protection law, he has since been allocating additional resources in education and publicity, and engaging related industries with a view to strengthening the culture of respecting others’ personal data privacy by complementing legal compliance with data ethics, as well as maintaining a proper balance between free flow of information and data protection without unduly compromising ICT and economic development.

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