Hong Kong authorities have said they will legislate against persistent sexual abuse of children and the act of sending images of genitals to others online without consent after consulting the public. In a consultation report published on Thursday, the Security Bureau stated that with the city’s two professional legal associations expressing broad support for a…
Retired Catholic leader Joseph Zen Ze-kiun and four other activists have lost an appeal against their convictions for failing to register their legal defence fund for those involved in the 2019 anti-government protests in Hong Kong. The Court of Appeal on Thursday upheld a magistrate’s findings that the now-defunct 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund fell within…
Hong Kong has launched the first regional mediation and arbitration platform dedicated to medical and healthcare services as part of the city’s efforts to resolve local and cross-border disputes and strengthen its bid to become an international legal services hub. The Healthcare Dispute Resolution Centre, a non-profit organisation set up in 2024, announced its new…
“True friends stab you in the front?” This is a quote most likely to be misattributed to Oscar Wilde. What he wrote instead in The Devoted Friend was: “But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter,…
Jury trials are a rarity among the world’s legal traditions, but a fundamental bedrock of the common law system. The jury’s role as the decider of a defendant’s guilt makes them the natural centrepiece of a criminal trial, but an often overlooked part of the process is the role of the trial judge. The judge…
The Hong Kong Bar Association has filed a judicial challenge against a disciplinary panel’s decision to clear barrister and former opposition lawmaker Margaret Ng Ngoi-yee of professional misconduct over her participation in a 2019 anti-government protest. The association’s council on Friday applied for a judicial review of the disciplinary tribunal’s decision that Ng’s conviction for…
The Hong Kong Bar Association has said it “broadly supports” a dedicated offence for persistent child sexual abuse, after concerns over evidential issues in such cases were resolved in other jurisdictions in the past two decades. Vice-chairman Martin Hui Siu-ting said that while the association had reversed previous reservations it expressed when the city last…
Hong Kong is “actively considering” creating a dedicated offence to target persistent sexual abuse of children, after more than 90 per cent of suggestions from a month-long public consultation backed a proposed overhaul of laws tackling sex crimes. Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung said on Friday that more than 6,000 suggestions were received throughout…
My 18-year-old summer intern is very scared of me. She spent the entire week watching me sit in front of my computer, in complete silence, motionless except for the occasional click of the mouse to move to the next electronic document, and barely breathing. She told me this could not be further from what she…
One of the main features of the “one country, two systems” principle is that, despite our physical proximity, Hong Kong has a very different set of laws from those of mainland China. Very often, we talk about our differences when explaining the system to one another. But at heart, both legal systems seek to deliver…