Judge resigns over rulings fiasco

Court of First Instance Judge Audrey Campbell-Moffat, who higher courts ruled to have wrongly released four foreign drug-trafficking suspects in three trials, has resigned, says the Judiciary.

Campbell-Moffat, 66, applied to Chief Justice Andrew Cheung Kui-nung in early August for early retirement, a Judiciary spokesman said yesterday.

Early retiring judges are required to sit for another year during the notification period, meaning Briton Campbell-Moffat will leave the position in August next year.

In 2019, the Judiciary extended the retirement age for judges in the Court of First Instance and Court of Appeal from 65 to 70.

When Campbell-Moffat reached the age on 65 in June last year, she chose to extend her tenure for five more years.

Just two months later, she tendered her resignation under the early retirement mechanism. At that time, the Court of Appeal was handling two appeal cases against her "no case to answer" rulings in two jury drug trafficking trials - one involving a man from Honduras and the other two Indonesians.

The Court of Appeal eventually ruled Campbell-Moffat's decisions were wrong, saying she usurped the jury's function by accepting defense claims even when the prosecution had sufficient evidence.

In the second case, the jury questioned the "no case to answer" ruling and asked if they were allowed to tell the media about case details, but Campbell-Moffat rejected their request.

"It is regrettable in the extreme that a conscientious jury, who were about to receive the judge's instructions in a summing-up in a very serious case of international drug trafficking, should have felt so concerned about the direction that they found it necessary to challenge her," Court of Appeal vice president Andrew Macrae and appeal justices Kevin Zervos and Anthea Pang Po-kam wrote in the judgment last month.

The acquittal of the three defendants allowed them to leave Hong Kong eventually "in a serious miscarriage of justice by usurping the function of juries."

On Monday, the Court of Final Appeal unanimously ruled Campbell-Moffat had wrongly granted a permanent stay of proceedings and bail for another drug-trafficking suspect, a British man.

Five top judges, including Chief Justice Cheung, said Campbell-Moffat had made erroneous judicial decisions.

In May, Campbell-Moffat was fined HK$1,000 for careless driving. She received her legal education in the UK, where she was born and raised, before becoming a barrister in Hong Kong in 2000. She was appointed senior counsel in 2013 and a judge at the Court of First Instance in 2016.