Hong Kong High Court judge Wilson Chan to be reprimanded again for plagiarism
Chief justice to take Chan to task for second time since 2023, after he copied large parts of submissions for judgment in repeat of earlier instances
Hong Kong’s chief justice will once again reprimand a High Court judge and require him to undergo training after he was found to have plagiarised large swathes of submissions for a judgment, in what is at least his seventh instance of extensive copying.
In a response to the South China Morning Post on Wednesday, the judiciary said that Wilson Chan Ka-shun would face a “serious reprimand” from Chief Justice Andrew Cheung Kui-nung for the second time since 2023.
The judiciary said that in light of Chan’s previous instances of plagiarism in 2023 and 2024, it adjusted his judicial duties last year and assigned him primarily to criminal cases that did not require written judgments.
The move was taken “so as to avoid occurrences of excessive judicial copying in his judgments”, it said.
“As Mr Justice Wilson Chan’s judgment in the present case involved again a substantial amount of judicial copying, the chief justice of the Court of Final Appeal and the chief judge of the High Court will issue serious reprimand to [Chan] again regarding the matter and request him to undertake targeted training,” the judiciary said.
The chief judge of the High Court is Jeremy Poon Shiu-chor.