Hong Kong’s election ban may be legal, but the controversy will rumble on

Last year, six legislators in Hong Kong were disqualified from holding office for failing to take their Legislative Council oath properly. This triggered a series of by-elections to fill the vacant seats. On January 27, six weeks before polling day, electoral authorities set off a political firestorm by declaring Agnes Chow Ting, one of the candidates on Hong Kong Island, ineligible to stand for election.

In fact, even before the nomination, a few pro-government media had reported that Chow, a founding member of Demosisto, a political group which advocates self-determination, and possibly Edward Yiu Chung-yim as well, would be debarred from standing. Yiu, who got the nod nonetheless and is running in Kowloon West, is a former legislator elected in 2016 in the architecture and planning constituency. He is one of the six who were disqualified in the oath-taking saga.

The government trod carefully in handling these contentious nominations, knowing that it would be caught between the Scylla of world opinion on its obligation to safeguard political rights, and the Charybdis of holding elections that conform to national and legal requirements about sincerity in upholding the Basic Law.

So far, apart from Chow, two more candidates, Ventus Lau Wing-hong and James Chan Kwok-keung, both running in New Territories East, have been declared ineligible because of their pro-independence stance. Chan was barred from running in the Legco election in 2016 for the same reason, while the evidence against Lau comprised his Facebook messages in 2016 reiterating support for independence.