Qianhai Cooperation Zone People’s Court, which is entitled to deal with all of Shenzhen’s commercial cases involving Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and foreign entities, released a white paper Thursday, elaborating on its current practices for adopting Hong Kong law judgement.
According to the paper, the court strives to create a complete guarantee mechanism to maximize the application of Hong Kong law. It has made a guideline with detailed interpretations to identify Hong Kong-related factors in cases, in order to allow related parties to freely choose the applicable Hong Kong law.
As for cases that do not have Hong Kong-related factors but have Macao, Taiwan or foreign-related factors, it supports the parties in applying Hong Kong law in accordance with the law’s provisions and judicial interpretations. If the legal relationship of the case is not directly related to Hong Kong factors but the associated legal factors are foreign or Hong Kong-related, the court allows the parties to choose suitable international commercial practices and international trade rules.
To ensure the application of Hong Kong law, the court has set up a system for law ascertainment. The court allows professional institutions and judges to ascertain foreign law, adopts expert opinions on certain laws and specifies and invites its Hong Kong jurors and Hong Kong mediators to help improve the ascertainment system. It has also built a platform for ascertainment by inviting higher education institutions, research centers and other third parties to work together.
By the end of May, the court had accepted and heard 3,022 cases that were related to Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan or foreign entities, accounting for half of the total cases (2,198 cases were related to Hong Kong parties). By the end of June, two cases were successfully mediated by applying Hong Kong law and one of the cases that adopted Hong Kong law had been given a verdict but had not yet been put into effect.
According to statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics, 76.5 percent of enterprises said they were willing to apply Hong Kong law when signing contracts with Qianhai’s Hong Kong-funded enterprises.
In 2016, 4,223 Hong Kong companies were registered in the Qianhai-Shekou Pilot Free Trade Area.
