Average age of 37 for top Macau judges
Macau's post-handover Court of Final Appeal will have one of the youngest teams of any supreme court in the world.
The average age of the three judges is just 37 years.
Its president, Sam Hou-fai, who will be the post-handover chief justice, is aged 38 and became a judge only two years ago.
His two colleagues are Chu Kin, 30, with five years' experience and Viriato Manuel Pinheiro de Lima, 45, from Portugal, who has 20 years' experience.
Judge Pinheiro de Lima cannot hold the top post because he is not Chinese. All three are now members of the Court of First Instance.
Judge Sam was born in Zhongshan, Guangdong and studied law in Beijing and Portuguese culture and language in Portugal.
He is a graduate of Macau's training centre for judges and public prosecutors and joined the bench in 1997.
The tender age of the appointees - the average age in Hong Kong is around 60 - is not a total surprise but the issue of judicial inexperience has raised some concerns in Macau.
The appointments were announced yesterday by chief executive-designate Edmund Ho Hau-wah's office. The three are among 24 judges, nine of them Portuguese and Macanese and the rest Chinese.
The five-member Court of Second Instance, which replaces the seven-member Superior Court, will be headed by Judge Lai Kin-hong and includes Judge Sebastiao Jose Coutinho Povoas, who is the only Superior Court judge to sit in the Court of Second Instance.
He ran Macau's judge training programme, launched in the early 1990s.
The 14-member Court of First Instance will be headed by Tam Hio-wa.
The 24 appointments were made on the recommendation of an Independent Commission comprising judges, lawyers and community leaders.
Macau's Portuguese legal system is part of the continental European family of codified law and is structurally similar to mainland China's legal system.
