Legal expert calls for increase in city's 'outdated' jury pool
Legal expert says city's outdated and restrictive selection system should be expanded to include people from a wider range of education levels
Hong Kong's jury pool - which includes only about 10 per cent of the population - is too small and should be made more representative of the community, a legal expert says.
"The jury system should be representative of the community," he said, comparing its importance to the composition of the nominating committee that will select chief executive candidates in 2017.
Another factor is the reluctance of people building careers and establishing their professional lives to serve as jurors, particularly in long, complex cases.
A more flexible jury pool could ease the difficulty in recruiting jurors for trials that drag on for weeks and months as most of the currently qualified people had full-time jobs, Young added, not referring to any recent or pending cases.
Latest figures provided by the Judiciary show that there were 714,046 people on the list of jurors at the end of 2013, about a tenth of the total population.
In England and Wales, a person registered as a parliamentary or local government elector is usually qualified to serve as a juror in most courts. The juror list in Hong Kong could more than triple if all 3.47 million registered electors became eligible.
