Hong Kong’s legal community calls for more support for judges after chief justice criticises arbiter for copying in verdict
- ‘Totally unacceptable’ for Mr Justice Wilson Chan to use more than 98 per cent of plaintiff’s wording in his own ruling, says Chief Justice Andrew Cheung
- Bar Association chairman Victor Dawes stresses judges under immense pressure and have more work than counterparts overseas
Members of Hong Kong’s legal community have called for more support and guidance for judges after one was reprimanded by the city’s chief justice for copying almost the entirety of written submissions from the winning party in a civil case.
The calls by the Bar Association and a law professor on Wednesday followed a Court of Appeal judgment last Friday that criticised Mr Justice Wilson Chan Ka-shun – who has previously faced similar complaints – for failing to discharge his judicial duties in an intellectual property lawsuit.
Chief Justice Andrew Cheung Kui-nung had found Chan’s conduct to be “totally unacceptable”, a judiciary spokesman on Tuesday said. He also instructed the Judicial Institute, which organises lectures and training sessions for court officials, to improve judges’ awareness of the issue.
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“He believes judicial copying is unfair to both parties in a case and undermines the public’s confidence in the administration of justice,” the spokesman said.
Friday’s ruling also prompted three judges hearing an appeal in a separate case on Wednesday to disregard Chan’s findings and examine evidence in the original trial themselves.
The controversy stemmed from the intellectual property lawsuit that was first filed in 2014. In that case, Chan, a Court of First Instance judge ruled in favour of the plaintiff, Wong To Yick Wood Lock Ointment, after finding a Singaporean firm had infringed its trademarks.
But his judgment, delivered in April 2021, incorporated verbatim more than 98 per cent of the plaintiff’s arguments.
The defence complained there was “not one full sentence written by the trial judge in his own words”, with the only new elements being the full spelling of abbreviations used in the winning party’s affidavits and other cosmetic changes.
The appellate court held that the extent of replication would leave a reasonable person with “a justified sense of grievance” that Chan did not apply an independent mind in deciding the disputes.
“If he simply copies one party’s submissions extensively as his judgment, the more justified would be the losing party’s sense of grievance that the judge had just taken the easy way out and abdicated his judicial responsibility,” the Court of Appeal said.
Bar Association chairman Victor Dawes declined to comment on the trademark case, but said the city’s judges were under immense pressure and had much more work to do than their counterparts overseas.
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“This is something the public may not appreciate and the profession should do its very best in supporting our judges. The judiciary will need support if Hong Kong is to maintain its status as a regional dispute resolution centre,” he said.
Hong Kong currently has 164 judicial officers at all court levels and tribunals with 47 vacancies, according to the judiciary.
A spokesman for the judiciary said it would continue to monitor the manpower situation and recruit deputy judges and magistrates from time to time to meet its operational needs.
Simon Young Ngai-man, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, said the case was “one of the rare ones where the extent of the copying crossed the line”.
He said that while judges fully incorporating submissions did not necessarily indicate unfairness, the appeal court had in this case placed emphasis on the legal principle that justice must be seen to be done.
Young urged the judiciary to provide better guidance to court officials on writing judgments. “If we reduce the extent of judicial copying in all its forms, judgments might even be shorter, which would be beneficial to everyone,” he added.
It is not the first time Chan has faced complaints of plagiarism. He was accused of extensively copying from counsel’s submissions in two other cases heard in the Court of Appeal in 2019 and 2020. In the latter case, the judge was said to have delivered a ruling in which 61 of the 70 paragraphs were verbatim reproductions of the winning party’s evidence.
While the appellate court did not find a case of plagiarism against the judge in both appeals, it remarked in the 2020 hearing that it was “unfortunate that the judgment was written in such a manner that lends itself to a challenge of this nature”.
A similar complaint was filed on Wednesday, with the Court of Appeal asked to set aside various rulings by Chan in relation to a family feud over control of one of the city’s property giants.
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The court said it would revisit the evidence in the trial itself while giving little or no weight to Chan’s reasoning when considering the complaints.
Additional reporting by Kahon Chan
