Noel Power

Who was Noel Power?

Sir Noel Plunkett Power, GBS was a senior judge in Hong Kong and Brunei Darussalam. He had been a barrister-at-law in his home-country Australia when he joined the judiciary of Hong Kong in 1965 as a magistrate in the Lands Tribunal. Since then, he had been successively promoted as President of the Lands Tribunal, a puisne judge of the Supreme Court and Vice President of the Court of Appeal. In 1996, he became acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court when Sir Ti-liang Yang resigned and contested for the first ever election of the Chief Executive. After the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to People’s Republic of China in 1997, he was appointed Vice President of the Court of Appeal of the High Court. He retired from the High Court in 1999 but remained as a non-permanent judge of the Court of Final Appeal.

Sir Noel was honoured with a knighthood and a Gold Bauhinia Star in 1999 by the British monarch and the Government of Hong Kong respectively. He chaired an independent inquiry to probe into the opinion poll scandal of the University of Hong Kong in 2000. In 2005, he was one of the presiding judges of the Court of Final Appeal who heard the inheritance dispute between local tycoon Nina Wang and her old-aged father-in-law. In his later years, Sir Noel was a judge of the Court of Appeal of Brunei Darussalam and was appointed President in 2007. He died in office in 2009.