Kemal Bokhary rejects nationality criterion for top judges

Nationality should not be a criterion for appointing judges to the city’s top court, Mr Justice Kemal Bokhary said on Friday, rejecting a suggestion that only Chinese nationals should take up the posts.

The liberal judge, who retired as a permanent judge on the Court of Final Appeal last month, was responding to a mainland scholar’s suggestion that overseas judges should be excluded from Hong Kong’s highest court.

“If you make a change, you really want to know why you are making a change, and people will worry about it. But I do emphasise commitment to Hong Kong and understanding of Hong Kong is not a matter of nationality,” Bokhary said on a Cable TV interview broadcast.

Earlier this month Cheng Jie, an associate professor of law at Tsinghua University, said all Court of Final Appeal judges should be Chinese nationals. He made the comment during a seminar on the Basic Law in Hong Kong.

Bokhary was asked whether he thought the 2001 Court of Final Appeal ruling – which conferred automatic residency on babies born to mainland parents in Hong Kong – would have been decided differently had it reached the court in 2047, or 50 years after the handover. He replied that he would expect a similar ruling.

“It seems to me that the law is clear enough, and I don’t see how you can make it less clear by the passage of time,” he said. “Unless I think ill of the judges, I would expect a similar decision.”