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Prosecution by external lawyers should not be over-expanded

2021-12-23T22:37:40.925Z


This Wednesday (December 22), the Criminal Prosecution Division of the Department of Justice released the latest issue of "Hong Kong Criminal Prosecutions" annual report, reviewing the prosecution work of the Department of Justice last year. Prosecutor Yang Meiqi, who took office in August this year, reported


This Wednesday (December 22), the Criminal Prosecution Division of the Department of Justice released the latest issue of "Hong Kong Criminal Prosecutions" annual report, reviewing the prosecution work of the Department of Justice last year.

In the preamble of the report, the Commissioner of Criminal Prosecutions Yang Meiqi, who took office in August this year, stated that in 2020, the department “handled more and more controversial cases”, and in some politically sensitive cases, “prosecution decisions are often affected by different politics in the society. Unreasonable and biased criticism from spectrographers."

In addition, she also said that the epidemic has disrupted the working environment of prosecutors, but emphasized that they still respond quickly to cases related to quarantine orders.


According to the "Hong Kong Criminal Prosecutions" annual report, the number of cases prepared by the Criminal Prosecution Division to be heard by the Court of First Instance and the District Court in 2020 is 366 and 1,098 respectively. The prosecutors of the Division have handled 3,061 cases and appeared in court for 3,054 days, and outsourced. The lawyers handled 1,609 cases and appeared in court for 5,248 days in total.

Compared with 2019, the number of cases handled by prosecutors in this section fell by 16.2%, while the number of cases handled by outsourced lawyers increased by 13.7%. In addition, although the number of court days of both parties has decreased, the decline in outsourced lawyers has been Far below the prosecutors.

Zheng Ruohua, Secretary of Justice.

(Profile picture)

Criminal prosecutions rely heavily on outsourced lawyers

At the end of the previous year, the Secretary of Justice Zheng Ruohua wrote a blog stating that “In addition to cases of public events, we also need to deal with cases of other nature. If the staff in the Department of Justice is really insufficient, we can also hire some outsiders according to the established mechanism. Private lawyers and barristers come to assist, so that relevant cases can be handled in a timely manner."

Judging from the aforementioned statistics of "Hong Kong Criminal Prosecutions", the Attorney General seemed to have indeed adopted the approach she had proposed last year, which led to a significant increase in the number of cases handled by outsourced lawyers.

However, if the observation period is extended, it can be found that the Department of Justice's criminal prosecution work relies heavily on external lawyers.

Looking at the "Hong Kong Criminal Prosecutions" annual reports in the past few years, the outsourced lawyers handled nearly half of the cases handled by prosecutors from 2015 to 2017, and the total number of cases undertaken by the two parties was actually continuously being resolved; as for the day when the prosecutors appeared in court In fact, the number has always been lower than that of outsourced lawyers. In 2017, the ratio between the two was as high as 1:1.85.

It can be seen that the latest figures only show that this trend is continuing to expand.

The quality of prosecution depends on the team

What is even more strange is that during the same period, the size of the organization and resources allocated to the prosecution team of the Department of Justice itself increased.

With reference to the Controlling Officer’s Report, the Department of Justice’s criminal prosecution programme staff establishment was 587 in the 2015/16 financial year. By this year, it has expanded to 692 staff, and the proportion of positions occupied by the department has also increased from 45.3% to 45.9%. In addition, the programme is in The actual allocated allocation for the 2015/16 fiscal year was only about 600 million yuan, which was 40.7% of the entire attorney general's allocation. However, in the latest budget, it has greatly increased to nearly 1.1 billion yuan, which accounts for 43.8%.

Now that they have obtained more manpower and resources, they should be able to handle more cases.

Former Criminal Prosecutor Jiang Leshi.

(Profile picture)

Former Criminal Prosecutor Ian Grenville Cross expressed concern a few years ago that the Department of Justice has expanded the types and numbers of outsourced lawyers to handle cases, believing that this practice has the opportunity to dwarf the department as a "lawy office." And it is recommended to increase the practice opportunities of the department’s own team to control the quality.

At the beginning of this month, the industry began to question the injustice of fees in the outsourced lawyer system of the Department of Justice, and it might even allow major cases with different political positions to intervene in the trial process.

In order to dispel the doubts of the outside world, it is really necessary for the Department of Justice to carefully examine the relevant issues, so as not to damage the image of the rule of law in Hong Kong.

The establishment of a sentencing suggestion system must be cautious. The occurrence of "unjust cases" is not just a single problem. Search and arrange privacy. Legal risks need to be clarified.

Source: hk1

All news articles on 2021-12-23

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