Flying the flag for national hot topic

SOME surprising goings-on in the Court of Final Appeal (CFA) on Wednesday, where their lordships were hearing the Government's effort to re-establish the lawfulness of 'flag laws' which protect against insult to the flags of the People's Republic and the SAR.

Two men were convicted last year of desecrating the flags at a demonstration. Their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the laws concerned were unconstitutional because they infringed upon the Basic Law protections of freedom of speech.

Now I am sure the CFA would not be influenced in any way by anything I might say on this subject, and actually I do not really have any opinion to express on the case before their lordships.

Obviously, having a law protecting your national flag is a restriction on self-expression. Equally obviously, it is rather a small restriction, because the point you can make by damaging the national symbol can still be made in other ways.

Gerard McCoy, for the Government, argued that an indignity to the national flag was an indignity to the state. No doubt the PRC needs all the dignity it can scrape together. Some states protect their flags, some do not. I suppose that as far as the national flag is concerned many of us are happy to put up with whatever the national arrangement may be.

Surely, though, it is obvious - and indeed surprising that the matter had not come up before - that the same argument does not fly quite so happily when applied to the flag of the SAR itself. Clearly, under 'one country, two systems', we can regard the status of the national flag as a matter on which we should stress the 'one country'. A regional flag, on the other hand, looks like a regional matter. Nobody has suggested the PRC has a law against desecrating the flag of Guangdong province.

When the court raised this regional/national point, Mr McCoy turned out to be surprisingly, if you'll pardon the expression, coy. He needed time to seek instructions, he said. It appears the Department of Justice had not anticipated this rather obvious question. How odd.