HAVING spent the past few days celebrating the doleful pre-handover predictions which turned out to be quite unwarranted, let us now note that one of them was right on the money.
This was the prediction, quite widespread in those small circles where freedom of the press is taken seriously, that after the handover laws which had slumbered unnoticed and undeployed during the colonial era would be wheeled out and used against journalists.
Of course nobody got it quite right, because nobody predicted that a mere year after the handover we would be reading about an editor, Wong Yeung-ng, being jailed for scandalising the court.
Nor, indeed, that this would be widely tolerated, even welcomed. Emily Lau Wai-hing, who usually raises dissatisfaction with government policy to an art form, actually claimed to have asked for a prosecution.
English readers spared the experience of reading the Oriental Daily News by the absence of an English version can treat themselves, if that is the word, to extended excerpts by consulting the records of the trial. They will discover that the Oriental Daily is a most peculiar newspaper.
I have on occasions sympathised with the group's legal problems, but tirades against judges are no way to solve them. The lay reader cannot resist the thought this sort of thing must surely be illegal in some way.
Actually I imagine it was potentially illegal in a variety of different ways. The approach adopted by the Department of Justice has undeniably been effective in dealing with the situation. But do not rejoice too soon, children. Do you suppose that having conjured this legal tyrannosaurus from its slumbers we shall now find it so easy to send it back to sleep? The law on scandalising the court was a relic, an antique, a museum piece, a contemporary of the stocks and the ducking stool. The judgment in the Oriental Daily case has, at a stroke, vastly increased the documentation on the subject available in Hong Kong. The existing textbooks only devote a page or two to it, concluding with the comfortable thought that this area of the law no longer has any practical significance. Well, we have fixed that.