divorce by husbands which obtained under Chinese traditional law should be abolished. It is worth noting that none of the members of the Sub-Committee were able to unearth a single instance in the experience of themselves or their colleagues when a husband had actually used or purported to use these powers of divorce, and it is tempting to assume that they are already generally thought to be in desuetude, but their abolition should clearly be made the subject of specific legislation.
60. The Sub-Committee also agrees that no useful purpose would be served by granting a power of unilateral divorce to women, as was once apparently recommended.
61. It appears that the authors of the Report assume that once the intended legislation comes into effect, all marriages celebrated after the Appointed Date being monogamous, the remedies now afforded by the Divorce Ordinance would be available in respect of all Chinese marriages. The Sub-Committee would favour the extension of the existing matrimonial remedies in substance, but it would, in accordance with the views it expressed earlier, deplore any presentation of this extension which was based on the theory that, by making Chinese marriages monogamous, the law would treat them as the "civil equivalent of a Christian marriage" a formula which, while convenient at the time it was first introduced into the Colony's legislation, expresses an attitude towards the jurisdiction of the courts in matrimonial matters which is now almost universally regarded as out of date, particularly in such a diverse and mixed society as that of Hong Kong.
62. Similar considerations arise, in the Sub-Committee's view, out of the discussion in the Report of the dissolution of Chinese marriages by the mutual consent of the parties. In the main body of the Report (at pp. 55-56), the authors seem to have been prey to some doubts about the wisdom of permitting divorce by consent under the proposed statutory law of Chinese marriage, though in their Recommendations they eventually suggest that it should be allowed subject to certain safeguards. The Sub-Committee finds it puzzling that such doubts could have occurred to the authors of the Report; on the assumption made in the Report that the proposed legislation should refer only to Chinese marriages (an
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