1418
HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 18 May 1988
He said: Sir, I move that the Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Amend- ments) Bill 1988 be read the Second time.
The main purpose of this Bill is to increase the limits of jurisdiction of the district court in civil matters and of the Small Claims Tribunal. The Bill also makes one or two other changes which I will come to in a moment.
At present, the district court has general jurisdiction to deal with claims in contract or tort where the amount claimed is, or is worth, not more than $60,000; similarly, in relation to such matters as the administration of an estate or of trust property the district court has jurisdiction where the property is worth not more than $60,000. Where the proceedings are for the recovery of land or relate to the title to land, the jurisdiction limit is that the rateable or annual value of the land must be not more than $45,000. These limits were set in 1983, five years ago.
The present position in the Small Claims Tribunal is that it has jurisdiction to deal with a range of civil matters where the amount involved is, or is worth, not more than $8,000. That limit was set in 1986.
Increases in these jurisdiction limits were recommended in December 1986 by Mr. Peter ROBINSON in his Report on the Hong Kong Judiciary. He took the view that some civil work is being done at too high a level. This, he said, resulted in an inefficient use of human resources, high litigation costs for claims that were not, in today's terms very large and consequent discouragement of some potential plaintiffs. He also thought that the district court was underloaded with civil work and could relieve the High Court of some of its burden. He accordingly recommended that the district court's general jurisdiction should be raised to $250,000.
Consultations on this recommendation have revealed, however, that an immediate increase to that level would not be advisable. It would bring into the district court a class of litigation involving quite sizeable sums of money for which its rules of procedure do not at present provide adequate interlocutory procedures.
The proposal in this Bill is, therefore, that for the time being the district court's general civil jurisdiction should be increased only to $120,000—that is to say double the previous figure-and that the jurisdiction in relation to land be increased to $100,000. Meanwhile, work will be set in hand to make the necessary improvements to the district court's rules of procedure. And that has been done, the question of increasing the general civil jurisdiction to $250,000 will be looked at again.
As regards the Small Claims Tribunal's jurisdiction, the Government accepts that the burden on persons litigating or contemplating litigation for sums between $8,000 and $15,000 can be lightened by increasing the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Tribunal to that figure. This implements ROBINSON's recom- mendation on this point.