HONG KONG - A former judge of Hong Kong’s top court on Tuesday called for a radical reform of the culture of the city’s courts, which he said have been favoring individual rights over the public interest and “gone on to completely the wrong track”.
Each time the court so decides, it directs personal sovereignty, personal rights above community interest. That trickled down to the community.
Henry Litton, a retired judge of the Court of Final Appeal, Hong Kong
Over a considerable period, the courts have raised the importance of personal sovereignty way above the community interest, said Henry Litton, a retired judge of the Court of Final Appeal, on TVB Pearl’s weekly show Straight Talk.
“Each time the court so decides, it directs personal sovereignty, personal rights above community interest. That trickled down to the community,” he observed.
Litton cited several court rulings in which individual rights, such as freedom of expression, freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate, were elevated above the community interest.
The reform must come from the very top of the judiciary, he said.
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Litton also voiced his concerns on the abuse of the Basic Law over the past 15-plus years by various counsels and how it was tolerated by the courts.
Litton cited the case of the anti-mask law in which two High Court judges ruled in November 2019 that the Emergency Regulations Ordinance, invoked to introduce the ban, was incompatible with the “new constitutional order” established after the 1997 handover.
“The judgment that they rendered was absolutely outrageous. They had, in effect, assumed what was a sovereign right to say what the constitutional order for the Hong Kong SAR should be and decided accordingly,” Litton said.
In an opinion piece published in the local English-language newspaper South China Morning Post in early September, the veteran judge said the judgment showed “total insensitivity” to the policy of “one country, two systems”, as the final power of interpretation of the Basic Law lies not with the Hong Kong courts but with the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the nation’s top legislature.
The Court of Final Appeal upheld on Monday the constitutionality of the anti-mask law as well as the government’s power to invoke the emergency ordinance.
READ MORE: HK's highest court upholds govt ruling on face masks
In another criticism of the city’s judiciary, Litton said the courts’ judgments focus not on the real issues but arguments put up by counsels, despite many such arguments being quite absurd.
The function of the court is not to entertain arguments brought forward by the counsels, Litton stressed.
He also noted the abuse of the process of public law, particularly the process of judicial reviews of executive decisions.
Litton took note of the startling spike in the number of judicial review applications, which was almost 35 times higher in 2019 than it was in 1997.
According to a Legislative Council report, there were just 112 applications for judicial review in 1997.
