Patrick has been working in various NGOs since 2004. He was a court reporter with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong in 2000–2003. He has been a researcher with Amnesty International’s International Secretariat (2013–2020), mainly covering human rights defenders in China and human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. He was the executive secretary (2007–2012), board member (2012–2020) and consultant (2021) of the Hong Kong–based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, which was disbanded under the pressure of the Hong Kong National Security Law. He was a board member of Amnesty International Hong Kong in 2009–2013 and the executive secretary and board member (2009–2013) of the Independent Chinese PEN Center. He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Chinese Studies of St. Andrews University in Scotland in June to August 2021 and was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Comparative Law of Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. He is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo. He is a board member to the UK-based “The 29 Principles” which supports human rights lawyers in China and Hong Kong, board member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), board member of Japan Hong Kong Democracy Alliance and advisor to the Tokyo-based Asian Lawyers Network (ALN). He is pursuing his PhD at the Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies at the University of Lyon, France.