Blunder may mean a free-for-all in Hong Kong parks
- Bureaucratic incompetence from the Leisure and Cultural Services Department has resulted in frontline staff being told not enforce the smoking ban in the city’s 450 public recreational facilities
- Does that mean there’s also a legal vacuum on laws prohibiting or regulating hawking, playing music, riding bicycles and other nuisances?
This is good news for smokers, not so much for the rest of us. You can now puff away at about 450 public recreational facilities – many of them popular parks – around town. I am not joking. At most, frontline staff will try to discourage you from smoking, but won’t slap you with a HK$1,500 fine. So much for the government’s anti-smoking policy.
Why? The Leisure and Cultural Services Department has confirmed to My Take that it “forgot” to deposit plans with maps at the Land Registry. This is legally required to demarcate the department’s jurisdictions for enforcement.
The department knew about the problem at least since last August, and blames it on discrepancies in the English and Chinese versions of the relevant laws. Call in the legal draftsmen, please. Oh no, that would take a long time.
How about just deposit the plans at the Land Registry? Those plans are readily available. Indeed, some parks – called “public pleasure ground” in legalese – post them at the entrance. But no, the department has yet to rectify the problem. What can be so hard?
Instead, it has instructed frontline staff not to enforce the smoking ban. This is from a government that is trying to show its toughness by pushing ahead with a blanket ban on e-cigarettes or vaping, with a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a HK$50,000 fine.