He will announce the appointments in due course, according to Leung.

At Friday’s legislative session, the city’s two most prominent legal bodies, the Bar Association and the Law Society, threw their support behind the new two-tier mechanism.

Most of the pro-establishment lawmakers who spoke at the meeting also supported the new arrangements, even though one of them, Paul Tse Wai-chun, described it as a “vase with no practical use”.

In a paper submitted to Legco last week, the government recommended the roll-out of the two-tier complaint mechanism in the third quarter of this year.

The first tier, which is more akin to the court’s current mechanism, is made up of a panel of judges tasked with investigating cases that are particularly serious, complex or a source of public concern.

The panel will submit its investigation reports and recommendations to the mechanism’s second tier – a committee comprising both judges and members of the public from outside the legal profession who will in turn advise the chief justice on how to handle the complaints.

The chief justice will then make a final decision on the matter. But the committee will have monitoring and advisory functions, and will also help the court improve practices and procedures surrounding the complaint mechanism itself.

A lack of concrete details in a paper the judiciary submitted to Legco last week on who would become lay members and how they would be appointed had sparked debate.

The paper said the members should have “profound expertise and experience in professional, community and public services”, but some feared the process could expose the judiciary to politicisation, particularly if the executive branch was tasked with appointments.

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However, while Leung offered assurances over political neutrality, she did not reveal how many lay members would be appointed.

Leung said judges would be in the majority on the committee because the role would require judicial expertise, yet she added there “will not be too few” lay members either.

Leung also said for trivial cases, the advisory committee might have a smaller role, but the first-tier judge-led panel would report those cases to it anyway.

Pro-establishment lawmaker Tse, who is also a solicitor, accused his colleague of complacency, saying the proposals would have little impact, with investigative and decision-making processes still the responsibilities of judges.

But his fellow lawmaker Priscilla Leung Mei-fun said the judiciary deserved some respect. “It should not be as though we are putting the judiciary on trial in public,” said the barrister, also a professor of Chinese law at City University.

Paul Harris, chairman of the Bar Association, said the body supported the proposals, describing the changes as “moderate and sensible”.

He said the disciplinary tribunal within the association had always incorporated a layman body and the set-up had worked well over the years.

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Brian Gilchrist, vice-president of the Law Society, said the arrangement “made sense” but urged authorities to consider putting more judges on the committee than lay members.

The new system is aimed at enhancing accountability and transparency, at a time when the judiciary has been inundated with complaints, many of which relate to political disputes stemming from the 2019 social unrest ending up in the courts.

The judiciary received more than 5,000 complaints last year, although most of them had nothing to do with judges’ conduct and instead related to court decisions, which should instead be handled by the appeal mechanism.