XN000022-1996-10-16 — Page 9

Implementation of improvements to prison rules delayed

Following is the speech by the Secretary for Security, Mr Peter Lai, at a motion debate on the Prison (Amendment) Rules 1996 in the Legislative Council today (Wednesday):

Mr President,

The proposed amendments to the Prison Rules were conceived after a thorough examination of the Prison Rules and existing practices. The new rules represent a significant improvement to the existing arrangements. As we have emphasised in our discussions with the Subcommittee, we recommend these improvements to the Honourable Members, having regard to two principles. The first principle is that these amendments serve to ensure consistency of the Prison Rules with the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance.

The second principle is that these amendments are modelled on the prison legislation in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, which have proved to be feasible and acceptable. We are satisfied that these improvements would work well in the penal system in Hong Kong, as demonstrated by similar rules in penal systems in other developed countries.

From the outset, we have made genuine efforts to put forward a package of reasonable and workable amendments, and we have kept an open mind to suggestions from the Honourable Members. Before the amendments were submitted to the Executive Council for approval, we consulted Honourable Members on various occasions, including the Legislative Council Panel on Information Policy and the Legislative Council Panel on Security. These discussions have proved to be very useful in helping us to refine our proposals along the way. We are grateful for the Honourable Members' views and have, as far as possible, incorporated them into our proposals.

The amendments were laid on the table of this Council on July 10, 1996, in accordance with established legislative procedures. We were aware of this Council's workload and the intervening summer recess, so we set the commencement date of the amendments at November 1, 1996, four months after the amendments were tabled in this Council. In all good faith, we believed that this timetable should have given Honourable Members time to consider the amendments.