Thankyou HKFP for highlighting the decline on a daily basis
A little-known judicial institute which organises workshops for magistrates in the city has suggested that the age of a young offender should not matter most when judges consider handing out a custodial sentence, Tim Hamlett writes.
Hello, what is this? Headline in the Hong Kong Standard: “Age of young offenders not most critical factor, magistrates told”.
The ensuing story relates that magistrates were told at a workshop that “providing an opportunity to rehabilitate does not mean that a defendant’s age can override other sentencing principles,” and so on for several paragraphs, to the effect that offenders who have committed public order offences should be sent to jail, age notwithstanding.
The workshop was organised by the Hong Kong Judicial Institute, a small off-shoot of the Hong Kong government. It nestles in the Judiciary, and is shy, but not secretive. Agile Googlers will find that the institute has the quaint old-fashioned habit of providing a directory of the phone numbers of all its staff. This comprises two directors (which seems a bit generous) three “counsel” and several secretarial people. It is presided over by a judge, I suppose as a public spirited part-time supplement to his usual duties.
The institute’s main activity is running lectures and seminars on legal topics for magistrates and judges. Many of them are uncontroversial and indeed — if you like that sort of thing — interesting. Among them is the occasional “sentencing workshop”.
Now I approach this particular workshop with some diffidence, because this comment comes at the end of a game of (no offence intended) Chinese whispers. The person who was actually speaking seems to have impressed one of the class sufficiently for him to pass the tale to a reporter for Sing Tao. From him it made its way (perfectly legally; they are sister papers) to the Standard, where because it was a “copy and translate” sort of job it was attributed to the man for all seasons, Staff Reporter.
Read the full article at
How sending children to jail slipped on to the Hong Kong legal agenda
