The government has withdrawn a bill defining the framework for inter-regional mutual legal assistance in criminal matters from the Legislative Assembly (AL) because authorities need to further study the cross-strait legal differences, according to the Secretary for Administration and Justice Sonia Chan Hoi Fan. Last week, the government announced that it had withdrawn the bill from the legislative body at the beginning of this month, after the bill had been sent to legislators for discussion at the beginning of the year. “[The bill aims] to establish necessary legal bases for the [implementation] of mutual legal assistance in criminal matters for the cross-strait two coasts and four places. However, the law systems are hugely different in different jurisdictions. [We] thus need to consider such differences fully and to seek a balance for maintaining the integrity of our own law system,” reads a statement released last Friday by the Secretariat for Administration and Justice. More study needed According to the Secretariat, the MSAR government believes there is a need to conduct further studies on the withdrawn bill as negotiations regarding the mutual extradition deals with Hong Kong and the Mainland are still on the table. “A deeper study into the bill will allow the [local law] to coordinate with certain principles in our mutual legal assistance deals with Hong Kong and the Mainland,” Secretary Chan said on the sidelines of a public event last Saturday, adding that the aim is to make the bill more operationally effective. The official also admitted that the time taken to discuss such deals has been longer than expected as a result of the legal differences between the various jurisdictions. In Friday’s statement, the Secretariat claimed that the government would continue studying different proposals for cooperation despite the withdrawal of the bill. The bill, which was announced by the Executive Council last December, is designed with the purpose of facilitating mutual assistance in criminal matters between Macau and the other jurisdictions of the People’s Republic of China due to increasing cross-border criminality. The AL president Ho Iat Seng said this March that the legislative body had not yet scheduled a time to discuss the bill, as they were handling more than ten bills, even though the government had handed in the draft after Chinese New Year in February.
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