XN000022-1995-06-14 — Page 43

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I would first like to thank Members of the Bills Committee, especially its Chairman, the Honourable Mr. Ronald Arculli, for their hard work and thorough examination of the Bill. We have responded positively to most of the ideas put forward by Members of the Bills Committee and these are reflected in the CSAs which I will move later. I believe the Bill has the support of most Members of the Committee, and I hope it will now receive the full support of this Council.

Mr President, I would now like to continue by outlining briefly the three major elements of the Bill.

First, the Bill will raise the financial eligibility limit for the standard legal aid scheme from $120,000 to $144,000. This proposed increase has taken into account the level of inflation since the current limit was set in 1992. The Administration will in future revise the limit every two years in the light of inflation. We will also conduct a comprehensive review of the overall approach that we take to assessing the financial eligibility of applicants every five years.

Secondly, the Bill seeks to expand the scope of the standard civil legal aid scheme. It gives the Director of Legal Aid the discretion to waive the financial eligibility limit in any civil cases where an applicant has a meritorious Bill of Rights (BOR) claim. This will include individuals making election petitions based on meritorious BOR claims. As a matter of human rights policy, legal aid will also be extended to persons making applications to the Mental Health Review Tribunal against detention in a mental hospital or the Correctional Services Department Psychiatric Centre.

Thirdly, the Bill introduces improvements to the Supplementary Legal Aid Scheme which provides assistance to the "sandwich class" whose financial resources are in excess of the amount prescribed for the standard legal aid scheme, but may not be sufficient to meet the high costs of conducting litigation on a private basis. The first improvement is to increase the upper financial limit under this supplementary scheme from $280,000 to $400,000, taking into account inflation since the introduction of the Scheme in 1984. This limit will also be revised in future on a biennial basis to take inflation into account.

At present, legal aid under the supplementary scheme is restricted to a number of civil proceedings, including certain claims in the District Court for damages and compensation for personal injuries. The Bill now expands the scope of the supplementary scheme to cover claims involving professional negligence on the part of medical doctors, dentists and lawyers, the three professions which have most frequent contacts with individual members of the public.