ABSTRACT
Despite the return of sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997, Hong Kong remains a common law jurisdiction, as set out in Article 8 of The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (the Basic Law). The reversion of sovereignty inevitably brought about changes in nomenclature and the establishment of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (CFA) gave Hong Kong a self-contained legal system, but overall there has been little change in the way Hong Kong’s criminal courts operate. There is understandably more use of Cantonese in the criminal courts these days and the Judiciary is more localized than before 1997, but the principle of ‘one country, two systems’ set out in the Basic Law leaves the previous system very much intact.
