HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL — 2nd October 1969.
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departments and authorities subject to investigation by the Com- missioner. Included in the first schedule are all ministries and departments and agencies such as the Civil Service Commission and the Central Office of Information. Another schedule, however, lists matters not subject to investigation. Among the most important of these are relations or dealings with foreign governments, security matters, police action, and personnel matters in the civil service and the armed forces. Also excluded are the public corporations, govern- ment contracts and local government.
The office of the New Zealand Ombudsman is not so limited as in the United Kingdom. However, when in December 1965 I as the observer of Hong Kong at the annual conference of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association held in Wellington, had the opportunity of meeting and discussing with Sir Guy PoWLES, the Ombudsman of New Zealand. Sir Guy confided to me the difficulty of having adequate investigations because of lack of staff to investigate into the complaints which in many cases require experts to do so and statistics have shown that during the period between 1st October 1962 and 31st March 1964, of the 1,100 complaints only 107 cases were adequately dealt with, representing about 9% of the total number of complaints.
As Ombudsman is an institution which is foreign to the concept of our consititution, we are not able to obtain full and accurate informa- tion about the actual operation of the institution from the country in which this system originated. Language difficulties and misinterpreta- tion of how the scheme actually works have often puzzled most of the English-speaking world. Probably this is the reason why Britain decided to have this scheme in a very restricted form.
As I understand it, an Ombudsman is not a kind of officer with unlimited powers to overrule the decisions of public officials. The Ombudsman's power is only to investigate and to recommend. In other words, he is an adviser to government and nothing else though his advice will not be rejected unless there are grave reasons for doing so.
It is not appropriate, in my view, to compare an Ombudsman with the Chinese censorate of ancient China. I must take exception to this comparison in that these Chinese officials, known as Yu Shih "" were members of Tu Cha Yuan "" known as Censors, whose principal duty was to keep the Emperor informed of all matters of public importance. In fact, their status cannot be compared with the powers and scope of an Ombudsman. If a Yu Shih found that there was any corrupt official it was his duty either to publicly or privately make a complaint against him to the Emperor, but if he wrongly accused any person he would be personally liable and would be punished for false accusations. It is true that sometimes his itinerary