Vision First, an organization that supports asylum seekers, estimates Hong Kong receives 2,000 of them per year. The UN agency says it receives about 300 applications for refugee status per year and approves, on average, 13.8 percent. Local Immigration Department figures show the territory received 1,174 torture claims last year and 88 so far this year, and allowed none.

But answers to some of Bawah's frustrations could come soon, in a ruling from the city's Court of Final Appeal in C, KMF and BF versus the Director of Immigration and Secretary for Security. The case, which concluded in early March and is awaiting judgment, challenges the government's policy of referring refugee claims to the UN Refugee Agency. If successful, Vision First executive director Cosmo Beatson, says, it could be "a watershed moment".

That's not the only legal challenge against the system. In December, the court ruled that the government must consider whether an asylum seeker, if sent home, would be exposed to "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," instead of only torture -- which the local bar association called "highly significant." A case arguing for the right to work for successful refugees and torture claimants will seek an appeal at the top court, and another one, on the right to an oral hearing in torture claims, might do the same.

"In the past few years, there's been a real quake in system which has shaken the legal landscape and brought to the fore ... the fact that refugees have rights," Vision First executive director Cosmo Beatson said.

The outrage generated by what he calls the "zero recognition rate" is one factor prompting the legal challenges. Of 12,300 torture claims that the immigration department has received since 2004, when it introduced its first torture screening system, only one has been approved. That, Beatson says, does not jive with asylum recognition rates of 20 to 38 percent in liberal democracies.

"Is this system is so unfair that it's not refined enough to find the genuine ones?" said human rights lawyer Mark Daly, who represented the plaintiffs in all these cases except the one ruled in December. "We've got young guys spending the best years of their lives in limbo. The system is failing them."

The Security Bureau said it was "not apparent that there should be any correlation between the number of substantiated claims and the standard of fairness or effectiveness of the screening procedures." Under the existing screening and statutory mechanism, it said, claimants are given "every reasonable opportunity" to make their case and can get publicly-funded legal assistance.

It said Hong Kong was small and had a dense population. Its unique situation, with its relative prosperity compared to the region and liberal visa regime, would make it vulnerable to abuse if the Refugee Convention were extended to it.