The Chinese mainland and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region jointly revised a 20-year-old legal assistance arrangement and issued it on Friday, in an effort to consolidate cooperation in resolving commercial disputes.

The revised legal assistance arrangement allows parties involved in commercial disputes to simultaneously apply for arbitral awards enforcement in courts on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong.

The new arrangement will accommodate increasing demand for more efficient handling and settlement in the judicial arbitration process. Closer business-to-business and people-to-people links between the mainland and Hong Kong in recent decades have put such an arrangement high on the grand regional development agenda.

It was officially written into the Supplementary Arrangement Concerning Mutual Enforcement of Arbitral Awards between the Mainland and Hong Kong SAR, and was signed in Shenzhen on Friday by the Supreme People's Court and the Hong Kong government's Department of Justice.

Hailing the timeliness of the move, Huang Jin, an expert specializing in international law at the China Law Society, said it marks great progress in strengthening legal assistance.

"Applicants involved in commercial cases will benefit a lot from this more convenient and efficient arrangement, as it can ensure arbitral award applications are implemented to a fuller extent," he said.

The original arrangement came into force in the year 2000. Without any amendment or supplement in the past two decades, it has fulfilled its expected purpose of facilitating arbitral development in the region while improving people's livelihoods, said Si Yanli, deputy director of the Supreme People's Court's research office.

However, with more people choosing to solve commercial disputes through arbitration, it created the need to revise the arrangement and add more provisions, she said.

"Previously, people were not permitted to apply for arbitral awards to courts on the mainland and in Hong Kong at the same time; in fact it created a lot of difficulties," she said.

"Someone might hide or transfer his or her properties in Hong Kong when an arbitral award was applied for in a court on the mainland," she explained. "Another scenario was when someone's properties on the mainland were not adequate for an arbitral award enforcement ordered by a local court, it might be too late to apply for another implementation in Hong Kong."

Now, the simultaneous application stipulated in the supplementary arrangement will solve the problem, she said, marking a step forward in improving legal assistance between the two sides.

The revised arrangement has also provided new alternatives in resolving commercial disputes.

Ding Kwok-wing, commissioner of the Inclusive Dispute Avoidance and Resolution Office of the HKSAR Department of Justice, said the revision is timely and will enhance legal information exchanges and cooperation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, creating a high-quality legal service and create more support to the region's communities.