The proposed laws on sedition are shaping up as the most controversial issue for the Hong Kong government since the former British colony was returned to China in 1997 because they affect the freedom of expression and association crucial to preserving Hong Kong's civil liberties.
Academics, student bodies, the local Roman Catholic church, journalists and lawyers have attacked the proposals, saying Hong Kong risks enacting more draconian laws than necessary. "The mainland is moving on. The fear that I have is that Hong Kong is moving back and there will be a convergence," says Audrey Eu, a local legislator and former chairman of the Bar Association.
Businessmen warn that confidence in the government's stewardship of the struggling economy is already shaky. "There is an asymmetry to every economy. When things are going badly, politics matters a lot," says Jim Walker, with emerging markets brokerage CLSA.
Few areas of the proposed laws have attracted as much attention as those pertaining to freedom of the press, which is crucial to the city's reputation as a financial centre. The proposed laws take an already draconian official secrets ordinance enacted just before Hong Kong's handover and make it toughter.
The existing ordinance already had an overly broad definition of "state secrets" and the government now proposes to add a category: "information relating to relations" between Beijing and the Hong Kong government. This is often the only big political story of the day, given the city's undemocratic political system that concentrates power in the chief executive, who was handpicked by Beijing. "Relations between the two governments could cover just about everything. This weakens our monitoring role," says Mak Yin-ting, of the Hong Kong Journalists Association.
Regina Ip, secretary for security, yesterday underlined that the government had never sought to prosecute journalists under the ordinance since 1997. As the debate has reached a crescendo in the past couple of weeks, however, it has become clear that many government officials have a shaky grasp of how journalists go about their business.
Controversy has also surrounded a new proposal to prosecute journalists for making an unauthorised and damaging disclosure of information obtained by unauthorised access to it. Seeking to reassure journalists this week, Robert Allcock, Hong Kong's solicitor-general, said information gained through "authorised leaks" would not be prosecuted.
The government sometimes seems to be in a time warp, say its critics. Referring to the case of a local reporter jailed on the mainland in the mid-1990s for publishing information revealed by a Bank of China source, Elsie Leung, Hong Kong's secretary for justice, said this was because the reporter refused to disclose his sources.
"She is so naive about standard journalistic practices around the world," says Ms Mak. Ms Leung added, however, that local courts, backed by Hong Kong's common law traditions, would decide such cases.
The likely effect of the new laws is to raise growing levels of self-censorship in Hong Kong on issues sensitive to China such as Taiwan and Tibet and the Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in China but legal in Hong Kong.
Alan Leong, the chairman of the Bar Association, warns that, under the proposed legislation, police would be able to barge into the offices or homes of local reporters and seize, say, documents pertaining to an interview with Chen Shiu-bian, Taiwan's president.
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