Congratulations, Hong Kong, for finally legislating Article 23
- Hostile powers will exploit new law to distract from crimes they are committing or helping commit in the name of freedom and democracy, but the city is strong enough to fight back
Sometimes you wonder if foreign critics have been given the same script to criticise the latest security legislation, so they never bothered to read Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.
The passage of the domestic national security law has taken almost 27 years, yet some of them described it as being “fast-tracked”. The new law will legislate Article 23 of the Basic Law, the city’s legal foundational document that came into effect on July 1, 1997.
Others claim the legislation is “bowing to Beijing”. Since there are 160 articles under the Basic Law, I suppose our critics can claim we have been “bowing to Beijing” 160 times since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997.
You don’t get to pick and choose which constitutional provisions you will respect and legislate, and which to ignore and denigrate. Or at least that’s what Western societies claim as the basis of constitutionalism. But if it’s being done by some other societies to which they are antagonistic, their propagandists will enter a united front to claim you can’t do it, even if that’s how we do it. It’s the same old, “do as I say, not as I do”.
Now I can almost understand what Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung – the government’s point man to draft and push the legislation through – meant when he said he had “very mixed emotions”.