14
JUSTICE HONG KONG BRANCH
Need for Ombudsman
There is no effective procedure at present to remedy inequitable decisions due to administrative blunders, incompetence, unreasonable delays, corruption, discrimination, officiousness and so forth.
Our highly centralized form of government might have met the needs of a small trading community in the nineteenth century. But Hong Kong has become highly industrialized and is very densely populated. Naturally, new circumstances give rise to new problems which call for new solutions. Your Committee considers that
particularly where there is no effective representation of the public in the making of Government policy, there ought to be set up an Ombudsman System to which citizens may appeal to correct wrongs they suffer or to seek redress for grievances they harbour.
There is little doubt that many of the needs for authoritative control or supervision of the activities of the administration which might be satisfied in most countries by an elective assembly are as keenly, if not more keenly, felt in Hongkong. Every means, there- fore, should be used to try to fill the gap left by the lack of represen- tative institutions, so that the evils often associated with a lack of democratic government are alleviated as far as possible.
Clearly the Ombudsman, apparently even needed in countries with a strong democratic tradition where legislatures are in a position to control the workings of bureaucracy, is needed more urgently where there are no effective means of such control. (In fact, as Mr. D.S. Wijewardane pointed out in a paper prepared for the Ceylon Colloquium on the Rule of Law in 1966, part of the need for an Ombudsman is the change in the nature of parliaments in the twentieth century, and in particular the pressure on parliamentary time. The Ombudsman represents a degree of specialisation of functions in this sense, doing for Parliament or the individual member of the legislature what they cannot do for themselves.)
The number of popular grievances which in reality arise from
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