Hong Kong chief justice calls on city’s lawyers to defend the judiciary’s reputation
Hong Kong’s chief justice has called on the city’s lawyers to speak up in defense of the judiciary’s reputation, adding that “repeated and gratuitous questioning” of judicial independence damaged the rule of law.
Chief Justice Andrew Cheung said that such questioning, whether it is made locally or internationally, “is based on nothing but disagreement with court decisions” and it was the responsibility of the city’s lawyers to speak up. This was because they knew “from intimate firsthand experience how the courts actually function even in the most difficult and controversial of cases,” Cheung said.
Speaking at an admission ceremony for new senior counsel on Saturday, Cheung said Hong Kong judges “administer justice strictly in accordance with the law, without fear or favor, self-interest or deceit.”Speaking to the media after the ceremony, newly-appointed senior counsel Law Man-chung said that the public had a responsibility to clarify the court’s reasoning when they doubted the reasons for a judgment. Law said because Hong Kong often had polarizing views, looking at the actual reasoning was the most reliable approach.
Commenting on those who criticized Friday’s sentencing in an unauthorized assembly case as excessive, Law said the parties in the case could still appeal if they found the judgment to be questionable.
He said the public should not believe that the rule of law is dead, simply because they disagreed with the court’s judgment.
Law said that Hong Kong still had judicial independence since the passage of the national security law.
After the ceremony, Cheung did not respond to questions from reporters on whether he could continue to defend judicial independence when the court’s decisions come under criticism from people with different political views.
The chief justice’s comments come after the District Court sentenced 10 activists on Friday to prison terms ranging from 14 to 18 months in relation to an unauthorized protest on October 1, 2019. In that judgment, judge Amanda Jane Woodcock said that “the politics, beliefs, opinions of any of the defendants and the strength of their convictions are irrelevant to sentencing.”
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