20 years of watching porn, all in the name of public interest

Wilson Yip Hing-kwok has been watching pornographic videos for the past two decades. He says it's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

Once every few months, the 59-year-old Kwun Tong district councillor sits in a court room in Eastern Court in Sai Wan Ho for an eight-hour hearing. His task, along with another lay adjudicator and a presiding judge, is to decide whether pornographic videos and, sometimes, publications, can legally be seen in Hong Kong.

Yip is now one of the most senior veterans in the Obscene Articles Tribunal - a statutory legal body established 23 years ago to draw the line under the city's moral standards.

'It is semi-voluntary work and I take it as serving society,' Yip said, adding that they received an hourly rate of HK$100 for their work. 'But sometimes it is really disgusting to spend hours watching the videos.'

In the past it was not hours, but days, he recalled. But there has been a 95 per cent decrease in the tribunal's workload over the past decade, along with a similar collapse in sales of pornographic discs - rendered obsolete by the rise of internet porn. The adult video vendors once prevalent in Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po have all but vanished, leading to a drastic drop in seizures that would have gone to the tribunal for classification.

A few years ago Yip served on a case that took eight consecutive days after a truckload of discs was seized. The two adjudicators had to watch them one by one. 'We just yelled when we saw the 'scenes',' he said, referring to explicit depictions of sexual acts, which would result in most circumstances, if not all, in a rating of Class III - obscene and banned.

The law is vague, with 'obscenity' and 'indecency' both defined as 'violence, depravity and repulsiveness'. Adjudicators have to judge material by the generally accepted moral standards, the dominant effect of the article as a whole, the recipient, location of display and whether the material has an honest purpose.