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- May 23, 2013
- Updated: 7:37am
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Court dismisses Albert Ho's legal challenge to Leung’s victory
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Seven months after Leung Chun-ying won the chief executive election, the High Court dismissed a legal challenge to his victory on Friday.
Mr Justice Johnson Lam Man-hon threw out a petition from Albert Ho Chun-yan, refusing Ho’s request that he extend the deadline for filing the challenge. Ho, the former Democratic Party chairman, finished third in the March election.
Ho has argued that Leung was not duly elected because he had made false statements about illegal structures during his campaign.
But Lam said Ho’s case had little merit.
“Since Mr Ho’s case has no real prospect of success, it would not be in the interest of justice to grant him an extension of time,” Lam wrote in his judgment handed down on Friday.
Under the law, an election petition should be filed within seven days of the announcement of the election result. But Ho filed his petition three months after the election because the suspected illegal structures at Leung’s home were not revealed until then.
At issue is whether Leung made a false statement when he attacked election rival Henry Tang Ying-yen over illegal structures at Tang’s Kowloon Tong home.
Ho claimed that by criticising Tang, Leung implied he himself had made no unauthorised alterations to his house, but six suspect structures were found there. Ho is the former chairman of the Democratic Party.
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5:22pm
What is less clear is why Mr Ho, an estimable man, with his heart in the right place, should have chosen to spend time and money tilting at this particular windmill - unless, of course, he took the view that any publicity is good publicity.
It strikes me that this hopeless judicial foray is emblematic of the Democrats' continued slide into political irrelevance - which in itself is a great pity and does less than justice to the political legacy of Martin Lee QC.
Until the Democrats get their act together, stop showboating, and stem the regrettable factionalism that has riven their ranks over the past couple of years, they will cease to be a party of any significant influence, and will continue to be outmanoeuvred by the emergence of more sophisticated and initially plausible politicians, adept at reading the political wind, but without the conviction of principle which so marked the establishment of the Democratic Party in Hong Kong.
