220
A J BRADBROOK
HKLJ (1977)
jurisdiction of the body established by legislation to determine such appeals.
Type of appeals procedure
At the outset, it should be noted that since the establishment of the present Authority in 1973 there has been a form of appeal available in certain circumstances to public housing tenants. Section 7(2) of the Housing Ordinance states:
"The Authority shall appoint a committee comprising six members, two of whom shall not be members of the Authority, for the purpose of hearing appeals under section 20(1); and at any meeting of the committee a quorum shall consist of three members, one of whom shall not be a member of the Authority.'
Although it will be argued that this present system of appeals before the appeals committee is unsatisfactory in many respects, as in the case of the tenancy agreement the law in Hong Kong represents a significant improvement to that in effect in many overseas jurisdictions. For example, in none of the six Australian States is a formal avenue of appeal established by legislation for public housing tenants, and the only course open to a tenant is to plead with the relevant State housing commission for a reconsideration of his case. The commission rules in this area are either non-existent or extremely vague.26 The Housing Commission of Victoria and the South Australian Housing Trust have no rules at all, while the rule of the New South Wales commission is that all decisions affecting individual tenants are subject to review, although in many cases the review is carried out by the same person who made the original decision. Thus, the review procedures in Australia are piecemeal and clearly give inadequate safeguards to tenants. Another example is the New York City Housing Authority, which for several years has had a board to which tenants could appeal against a notice to quit.27 However, in addition to the problem of the narrowness of its jurisdiction, there are the further problems that this board often fails to give the tenant an adequately detailed description of his alleged breaches of covenant before the hearing, and at the hearing the tenant has no opportunity to confront his accusers or to learn the sources of the board's information.
2 See Bradbrook, op cit, 115, for a discussion of the rules of the various
Australian State housing commissions relating to appeals.
**
See comment, Public Landlords and Private Tenants: The Eviction of "Undesirables" from Public Housing Projects' (1968) 77 Yale LJ 988, 993.