Lai See | Impatience over the slow pace of implementing law reforms

We have heard some muttering about the pace of implementing recommendations made by the Law Reform Commission. There is a feeling that while the commission does good work, the amount of time the government's policy bureau takes to make the changes is getting larger.

The extent of the problem is laid out in a paper presented to the Legislative Council Panel on Administration of Justice and Legal Services in June.

It starts by noting: "Law reform plays an important role in any society which aspires to maintain the rule of law. As our society evolves and new challenges arise, our laws have to change so as to meet the needs of society."

Following a brief outline of how the commission works, there is a table of recommendations showing when they were published and how long it took for them to be implemented.

The commission started its work in 1980 when implementation generally took six months to four years with some exceptions. Implementation in the early 1990s took between one and five years.

An exception was the recommendations dealing with sales descriptions of flats and pre-contractual matters, which was published by the commission in April 1995 and implemented 17 years later. Efforts to introduce Hong Kong's version of Chapter 11 have so far taken 18 years and still have not been implemented.

There was a recommendation in 1998 for civil liability of unsafe products that never made it to the statute books after encountering opposition from trade representatives.