No point in copying China legal system: expert

The MSAR legal system should not be changed to copy mainland China laws, experts said yesterday, during the opening panel of the Legislative Assembly’s annual seminar, this year focused on comparative law.
“Should we make local laws more similar to the ones in mainland China? I don’t think we should do it indefinitely,” Tsinghua University professor Wang Zhenmin, said in a reply to Macau Daily Times.
On the one hand, he explained, the introduction of ‘alien’ elements could pose problems for the existing legal system. “Some legal concepts are limited,” Wang emphasised.
A concern shared by University of Macau professor Jorge Godinho. For instance, he recalled, the concept of money laundering “transplanted from the Common Law” continues to create “serious doubts and disagreements”.
On the other hand, Wang said, “some local practices are good and we can learn from them, as well as from other regions of the world”.
Furthermore, “the legal system in effect in mainland China has a Civil Law tradition and, as such, is more similar to the one in Macau” than to Hong Kong’s Common Law, the scholar said in his presentation. That’s why the impact of the introduction of the “one country, two systems” principle was smaller in MSAR, he pointed out.

‘Legal lab’

Several lawmakers have regularly called for local laws to be made more similar to the ones in mainland China. In a way, that has already been happening, Jorge Godinho said.
Since the handover “a trend to apply heavier sentences and a bigger reluctance in granting probation has appeared,” he stated. Ao Man Long’s sentence to 27 years in jail for corruption and money laundering was just “the most obvious case,” Godinho said.
However, “it would be preferable if an inflow from ‘political law” did not occur and a drift from the Roman-Germanic basis did not take place,” the expert warned.
“That would not be desirable according to what was agreed upon and foreseen between China and Portugal” as part of the handover, he said.
Moreover, “it wouldn’t be in China’s global interest, as it thwarts the ‘legal laboratory’ role that Macau plays within China,” Godinho stressed. The territory could “contribute to the efforts to reform and modernise mainland China’s legal system,” he concluded.
Still, the scholar acknowledged that “in the long-term, Macau will perhaps become an evermore mixed system, of the Roman-Germanic technical-legal tradition brought by the Portuguese and China’s age-old Confucian culture”.

‘Impressive’ Basic Law

More than 10 years after it came into effect, Macau’s Basic Law has been “absolutely stable,” Portuguese scholar Jorge Bacelar Gouveia said yesterday. “So far no revision proposal has been put forward, even though there is a mechanism for revision. It’s impressive,” he praised.
“Sometimes laws can only be judged by their lifespan,” the Lisbon University professor said in a reply to MDTimes. “In many countries constitutional texts are always being changed but not in Macau,” he added. “It means the law was extremely well done, well thought-out, with the participation of several legal advisors, also from mainland China. Its stability is the proof,” Gouveia stressed.
The integration of the Basic Law in the “one country, two systems” was “a huge success,” Wang Zhenmin added. The link between the existing laws, approved during the Portuguese Administration and the new constitutional text was “relatively easy,” he explained. “The 10-year practice after the exercise of sovereignty over Macau was recovered is a proof of the success in this issue,” the Tsinghua University professors said.