Mr Justice Ribeiro was appointed a Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal on 1 September 2000. He was born in Hong Kong in 1949 and was educated here before reading law in the United Kingdom. He obtained his LLB (1971) and LLM (1972) degrees from the London School of Economics. On returning to Hong Kong, he taught as a Lecturer in Law at the University of Hong Kong from 1972 to 1979. He was called to the English Bar at the Inner Temple and to the Hong Kong Bar in 1978 and entered full-time private practice in Hong Kong in 1979, practising generally in the field of commercial law. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1990 and was made a Recorder of the Court of First Instance in 1997. He joined the Judiciary in 1999 as a Judge of the Court of First Instance. Then in January 2000, he was appointed a Justice of Appeal and, in September of that year, he was appointed a Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal.
Mr Justice Ribeiro was the Vice-Chairman of the Chief Justice’s Working Party on Civil Justice Reform and drafted the Interim and Final Reports on which the procedural reforms adopted in 2009 were based. From 2008 to 2014, he was a member of the Judicial Officers Recommendation Commission which recommends judicial appointments. He chaired the Judiciary’s Committee on Information Technology and has been a member of the Court of Final Appeal Rules Committee since July 2012.
Mr Justice Ribeiro is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple, an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In 2019, he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) by the University of Hong Kong. He was the President of the Alliance Française of Hong Kong between 2000 and 2016. He has been made an Officier of the Légion d'Honneur, Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was also a member of the Board of the Hong Kong Arts Festival and is a member of its Programming Committee. He also sits on the Board of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. He was awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal in 2022.