Caseload blamed for court delays

THE increasing waiting time for trials to be heard in the District Court was because it was sharing the workload of the High Court, according to Jacqueline Leong, chairman of the Bar Association.

The worsening delays prompted the Legislative Council's legal representative, Simon Ip Sik-on, to call for serious consideration to overcome the manpower shortage in the lower court.

But Miss Leong pointed out that District Court judges had been using their time and resources in hearing cases in the High Court to reduce its long waiting time.

She said the Attorney-General, Jeremy Mathews, had tried to keep as many criminal trials as possible out of the High Court and put them in the District Court to avoid undue delays, which might provoke challenges to prosecutions under the Bill of Rights.

The increase in criminal trials in the District Court meant that civil cases, including personal injury cases where litigants are urgently in need of money, had been left unheard because 90 per cent of the judges had been doing criminal cases, she said.

Last year, the average waiting time for civil cases increased by 42 days to 313 days in the District Court.

Miss Leong said the position was made more critical in the past two or three years because at least four District Court judges had been forced to sit in the High Court to help deal with the backlog of criminal trials there.