New | Top legal professors divided on chief executive nomination

Two top legal professors at the University of Hong Kong are split on a suggestion by a prominent international democracy scholar that the 70-strong legislature should become the nominating body for the chief executive election in 2017.

HKU law dean Professor Johannes Chan Man-mun, dean of the HKU’s law faculty, said Professor Larry Diamond’s plan was feasible as he regarded how the members were chosen as more important than the nominating committee’s size.

Basic Law Committee member Professor Albert Chen Hung-yee, a colleague of Chan in the HKU law faculty, disagreed. He said the intention of the city’s mini-constitution was to create a nominating committee that was different from the Legco and similar to the 1,103-strong election committee that chose previous chief executives.

But Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said small was better for the body that would put forward candidates for the first election of a chief executive by universal suffrage.

“It is better to have a small nominating committee that is capable of putting forward a genuine alternative candidacy for chief executive than a large body more or less like the current one that is not capable of doing so,” he said, elaborating on his idea to the South China Morning Post.

Echoing the views of former civil service minister Joseph Wong Wing-ping, who also suggested constituting the Legco as the nominating committee, Diamond said in a written submission to HKU that a low nomination threshold – of 10 to 12.5 per cent of the committee– would neutralise the over-representation of functional constituencies in the legislature.