Standing Up for Public Interest Standing: The Hong Kong Experience

1. Hong Kong, once hailed as a ‘liberal enclave’ located at the periphery of China, is known for its vibrant common law tradition and civic-minded citizenry that regularly ‘mobilize on shared constitutional meanings to resist perceived regime malfeasance’. Through lodging judicial review applications in the name of ‘public interest’, organisations and individuals move to combat administrative and constitutional injustice in the judicial fora. Nevertheless, noble though their causes might be, these public-spirited litigants must first surmount one jurisdictional hurdle before their applications can proceed – they must convince the courts that they have the requisite standing to bring the action. Toborrow the term coinedby Cane, they have to show ‘public interest standing’. While public interest standing is no novel concept to the law, its contours and operation continue to attract discussions and scepticism among judges, scholars and practitioners, catalysing the emergence of a sizeable corpus of case law across common law jurisdictions.