What Hong Kong and Macau can learn from Portuguese autonomous regions

The Portuguese influence on Hong Kong is deeper than generally known. Portuguese traders and missionaries transformed Macau into the locus of East-West intercourse three centuries before Hong Kong was colonised. The British officers who led that operation (and the Portuguese clerks who aided them) departed Macau in 1841. In 1985, the Hong Kong Legislative Council adopted functional representation based on a model practised in metropolitan Portugal since 1933 – a legacy that remains to this day.

READ MORE: Beijing chairman of Hong Kong’s basic law committee takes a look at Portuguese democracy

This week, we learned that a delegation led by Li Fei, chairman of the Basic Law Committee, visited Portugal to investigate how Lisbon manages its two “ultraperipheral” autonomous regions: the Azores and Madeira. This raises the question what form the autonomy of those two jurisdictions takes, and what the constitutional implications could be for China’s special administrative regions. The answer presents both rich opportunities and challenges.

First, the two Portuguese autonomous regions (PARs) are recognised in the constitution, and their rights are spelt out there rather than in separate Basic Laws. This grants them some permanency in that their privileges can only be extinguished via a burdensome constitutional amendment process. Nonetheless, neither has the right to directly participate in any constitutional revision. Although Hong Kong and Macau are not specifically named in the 1982 Chinese Constitution, they do enjoy the protection of two bilateral treaties (the Sino-British and Portuguese joint declarations, respectively) and the basic laws, which insure another 30-odd years of autonomy. Portugal, on the other hand, has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, guaranteeing fundamental rights protected by the UN with no expiration date.

Second, although their legislative assemblies are elected by universal suffrage, the PARs’ autonomous legislative power is weak. While their legislators are elected once every four years via a popular vote tempered by party-list proportional representation, they enjoy only a “partially exclusive responsibility” to legislate in areas not foreclosed by the national assembly. Unlike the list of national laws that apply to Hong Kong and Macau in the annexes of their basic laws, the list of competencies reserved exclusively to Lisbon in Article 164 of the constitution is quite long. It includes jurisdiction over criminal, monetary and fiscal laws. Although Hong Kong and Macau’s legislatures are still hamstrung by archaic functional representation, they enjoy a significantly broader substantive sphere of legislative matters not reserved to the sovereign.

Third, the executive authority reserved to Lisbon is a wild card that depends on the personality of the Portuguese president. Each PAR is assigned a “representative of the republic” that serves at the discretion of the president for as long as he or she holds office. The constitution does not impose a reverse obligation for that officer to defend the interests of the locality, but does give him a veto over local legislation. This arrangement would present other challenges in that the president may directly dissolve the legislative assemblies after ill-defined local consultations, an extreme act our local chief executives can only take after a nasty legislative showdown. Although the bar is high, we also enjoy formal, codified procedures for impeachment proceedings and the mandatory resignation of a chief executive under extraordinary circumstances.

Fourth, the PARs enjoy no independent judicial power; they are part of the Portuguese judicial system and subject to the nation’s Constitutional Court. The independent judiciaries of Hong Kong and Macau, meanwhile, instil confidence in local autonomy. Fifth, the Portuguese autonomous regions are tightly under the economic control of Lisbon. The rules governing their finances and monetary policy are expressly within the purview of the national assembly. Hong Kong and Macau, meanwhile, enjoy independent tax, customs, fiscal and monetary policies.

As the Azores and Madeira each have a population of roughly 250,000 and no notable industry, it is understandable that Portugal would be hesitant to create a more distinctive status for them.