A review of civil protection orders in six jurisdictions

• Main Author: CHAN, Wing Cheong
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Civil Procedure; Jurisdiction
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/3022; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/4980/viewcontent/Chan_2015_A_review_of_civil_protection_orders.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Traditional criminal and civil remedies are inadequate responses against the problem of domestic violence. The criminal justice system requires allegations to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, the focus is on punishment for past acts instead of prevention of vio-lence from recurring, and the existing criminal offences do not fully cover the range of undesirable conduct. As for the civil justice system, the court processes take too long and are often incomprehensible to litigants-in-person, and there are no clear penalties imposed by the law even if an injunction is awarded by the court. In order to provide vic-tims of domestic violence with the protection that is needed, jurisdictions from around the world have sought to fill the gap by enacting a separate scheme of protection orders to prevent acts of domestic violence from occurring. This article surveys the laws in six different jurisdictions (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, and New South Wales) to discern the different scope of the orders in these jurisdictions, the criteria for application and penalties for breach, and so on. Some key issues are identified in this com-parative review of the protection order legislation which hopefully can be considered in future law reform.