Comment from a Non-Practitioner: The Authorities Are Using All Means to Sell Article 23

By Emily Lau (Hong Kong legislator)

(Clearwisdom.net)

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government has come to the point of using whatever tactics they can think of to force through the legislation of Article 23 of Hong Kong's Basic Law. Security Secretary Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee has tried to forcibly sell this legislation proposal by distorting citizens' opinions. The government spent one million dollars HKD of tax payers' money to make four advertisements -- "Buy Insurance for National Security," "Foundation for Religious Freedom," "Foundation for Freedom of Speech," and "Foundation for Freedom of Information" -- so as to sell Article 23 softly. Those advertisements are meant to confuse the real issues.

The legislation council received a letter of appeal from a "Hong Kong Citizen," accusing the government's TV and radio advertisements, which say "Implementing Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law is buying insurance for national security," as being "barbaric and ridiculous," "making people uncomfortable, sick and disgusted" and "setting bad examples." This citizen also stated that the government should not have spent taxpayers' money to produce and bombard audiences and taxpayers with such advertisements, which are purely to sugarcoat the government's motives since the Hong Kong people have not reached an agreement on this legislation yet. This citizen also requested that the government stop broadcasting those advertisements.

Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law violates human rights and freedoms. It is not as simple as buying insurance. Who is going to take the risk of depriving people of their freedom to buy insurance? For very controversial and unsettled policies, the government should not use taxpayers' money to advertise them at all.

Besides producing the advertisements, the government is speeding up the legislation. In order to pass the draft bill before the Legislation Council goes into recess at the end of June, they asked the legislators to approve forming a committee to discuss and investigate the bill first. From last September when the inquiring bill came out to this June, it has only been ten months, and the government just cannot wait to end the freedom and civil liberties of the people of the Hong Kong Special Region.

Robert T.Y. Chung, director of the poll study program in Hong Kong University, pointed out that the number of signatures against the legislation is more than that supporting the legislation (60.2% of 369,612 signatures are against the legislation). However, the government just used the number of letters as evidence (67.5% of 100,909 letters are for the legislation) in order to fabricate the impression that most people are for the legislation. It is clearly distorting people's opinion.

When Secretary Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee answered the feedback proposals, she said the government has received only 32 proposals that requested modification among the one hundred thousand pieces of feedback, only 0.3%, and no major problems were found. Here I want to point out that, according to the information from a civilian human rights organization, at least 13 organizations and individuals' proposals were not listed in the compilation. Did that 0.3% include those proposals? Moreover, why did the government not seriously list the opinions of citizens concerning the seven crimes in the consultation document? Isn't that supposed to be the true intention of the consultation? Instead, the government categorized the proposals into for or against the legislation. The real issue is that citizens were never asked to express their views on the consultation documents.

The British government had a standard way of doing public consultations and established protocol on written consultations, requiring that all departments comply. There are three points that Hong Kong should understand. First, the consultation should list opinions and arguments that are both for and against. Second, specialists should be asked to collect the opinions. Third, you cannot simply "count the vote." Instead, attention has to be paid to the opinions from some representative organizations. Of' course, if the government had done these three things, there would have been a sincere consultation instead of the resulting negative impression that their minds were already made up. They have manipulated people's opinions and used whatever they can to achieve their goal of passing this legislation.

December 2002

(Courtesy of Hong Kong Economic Journal)

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/3/13/46390.html

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