Minister moves to ease concerns that Article 23 may be back on agenda in wake of riot after ‘sooner the better’ remark by former adviser
PHILA SIU, STUART LAU AND GARY CHEUNG
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 14 February, 2016, 12:40am
UPDATED : Sunday, 14 February, 2016, 12:49am
Former government Central Policy Unit head, Lau Siu-kai , says the sooner Article 23 is enacted, the better it would be for Hong Kong. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Hong Kong’s security chief has moved to quash concerns that controversial Article 23 national security legislation might be back on the front burner after a former top government advisor said it should be introduced in the wake’ of the Mong Kok riot.
Speaking in a television interview devoted entirely to last week’s violence, former government Central Policy Unit head, Lau Siu-kai , said the sooner Article 23 is enacted, the better it would be for Hong Kong.
Lau – who is now a senior member of a semi-official mainland think-tank – made the comments a day after Beijing branded the instigators of the riot “separatists”, a classification which appears to place them in the same category as separatists from Tibet and Xinjiang, who are considered a threat to national security.
Lau’s think-tank colleague and prominent mainland academic, Qi Pengfei, told the Sunday Morning Post that the language chosen by Beijing to react to the violence would have been arrived at carefully and could mark a “sea change” in how it would handle Hong Kong’s localists.
Yesterday, Lau said that although the pro-independence and localism ideologies are not supported by the majority of Hong Kong people, Beijing is concerned if they would grow and become a threat to national safety in the future.
“On legislating Article 23, in my opinion, the sooner it is done, the better it is. The sooner it is done, the more we can have a legislation that can protect national safety which also takes into account Hong Kong people’s worries and the special situation Hong Kong is in,” Lau said in a television talk show.
He added that if the article is not enacted, Beijing may “take actions” if it sees any threats to national safety in the city.
Last week, about 100 police officers were hurtwhen a protest against a crackdown on street hawkers evolved into a riot.
More than 60 people, some of them from the localism group Hong Kong Indigenous, have been arrested. Forty people have been charged with taking part in a riot, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.
When Beijing passed a sweeping new national security law in July 1 last year, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying assured Hongkongers that the government had no plans to enact Article 23.
But Leung said the city did have a responsibility to help ensure national security, which it should do by local legislation. The Basic Law requires the government to draw up its own national security law prohibiting acts that include treason, secession, sedition, or subversion.
Qi Pengfei, director of the Renmin University’s research centre on Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, told the Post the foreign ministry’s wording implied a possible sea-change in how Beijing handled Hong Kong’s localists.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not come up with a terminology lightly. Its statement must be decided after deliberation and discussion among various departments in the central government,” said Qi, fellow vice-chairman of Lau’s think tank.
“It may indicate a significant change of the central government’s attitude on the growth of localists forces in Hong Kong as it notes some localist groups are calling for separation from the mainland.”
It was the first time the terms “local organisation” and “separatist organisation” were used in official statements issued by mainland departments regarding Hong Kong affairs, Qi noted.
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Former secretary for security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, whose failed bid to push through the law in 2003 prompted her resignation, and brough 500,000 people out onto the streets in peaceful protest, said discussions could start now.
Ip said the old version of the bill was not suitable for today’s Hong Kong.
“It was actually pretty toothless. If you see separatist sentiments translated into violent actions, then secession legislation would be necessary. But how to define and how to punish – that ordinance was very loose and not applicable today,” she said.
Civic Party’s leader Alan Leong Kah-kit and Democratic Party lawmaker Albert Ho Chun-yan feared the fallout of the riot is an orchestrated attempt to push for Article 23.
Lau’s remarks, Leong added, could be evidence that “somebody … is orchestrating in such a way to bring about circumstances that would make way for Article 23 legislation”.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1912820/former-top-government-advisors-remarks-article-23-spark
