HERE is a riddle you will not find in your Christmas cracker. Is the Obscene Articles Tribunal (OAT) a court? Now you may suppose the answer is obvious. In the first place, the tribunal is run by the Judiciary Department, which is also responsible for a number of bodies that are clearly courts, like the magistracies and the High Court.
But this is an administrative argument, not a legal one. After all, the Judiciary is responsible for the Labour Tribunal, which does not seem to consider itself a court. Also, there are some very court-like bodies which the department is not responsible for, like those considering appeals over taxes, lift safety and such matters.
In the second place, you may think, there is the matter of terminology. It is called a tribunal, and is described in its ordinance as having jurisdiction.
This is a good point, but surely not a sufficient one. If the Government changed the name of the Legislative Council Finance Committee to the Finance Tribunal, and adjusted the other terminology accordingly, that would not make the committee a court. You would still wish to look at what the committee does.
Now what the tribunal does is quite simple. It classifies items submitted to it (it has no right to take the initiative in the matter) in one of three categories: indecent, obscene or neither.
This looks more like egg-grading than what we usually understand as jurisdiction. The tribunal does not decide guilt or innocence, assign responsibility or levy punishments. It does not make orders or award damages. It does, in fact, pretty much what the Film Censorship Authority does for films. And nobody has ever suggested the film censor is a court.
Come to that, nobody has ever suggested the Broadcasting Authority is a court, although the authority receives complaints, decides whether they are justified, and levies fines on errant broadcasters.