Human Rights Watch World Report 1995 - Hong Kong

Events of 1994

Human Rights Developments

Hong Kong's fate was thrown into deeper uncertainty during 1994 when Beijing reacted to the adoption of Governor Patten's electoral reforms by resolving to abolish all elected bodies upon its resumption of sovereignty in 1997. The implications for human rights in Hong Kong were ominous, given that elected legislators had become key advocates for stronger protections for civil and human rights. For its part, the government responded reluctantly to their proposals for civil rights measures, anxious not to reignite conflict with Beijing.

Governor Patten, after numerous futile efforts to reconcile China to its proposals for moderate electoral reforms, finally sent the first set of proposals regarding the 1994 District Board elections to the Legislative Council (Legco) in February. Legco approved them, lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, abolishing appointed seats and reducing the number of popularly elected legislators to one per constituency. In June, legislators approved the government's proposal for the 1995 Legco elections, which for the first time made all sixty seats elected by one or another electoral constituency, although the proposal fell short of recommending direct election by universal franchise for each seat.

Beijing's response was not subtle. The day after the vote, Chinese officials unveiled an electric signboard to count the number of days remaining until Chinese rule, and reiterated threats to dismiss all legislators and reconstitute all representative bodies after the June 30, 1997 handover. In September, just before Hong Kong held elections to district boards under the new law, Beijing formalized its position through a resolution of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress ordering the termination on July 1, 1997 of all elected positions at the legislative, municipal and district levels. Yet despite the pall cast by these pronouncements, Hong Kong successfully carried off the elections, producing the first district boards where all members were chosen by popular vote. A dark note was the disqualification as a candidate of Lau San-ching, a Hong Kong resident who spent ten years in a Chinese prison because of his attempts to contact Democracy Wall activists. The government, and later the High Court, upheld his disqualification under an ordinance barring criminal convicts and persons who did not reside continuously in Hong Kong for ten years, despite the fact that Lau's "criminal record" and forced sojourn in China were themselves human rights abuses.

As relations with the British administration broke down in 1993 over Governor Patten's electoral reforms, China had unilaterally established the so-called Preliminary Working Committee to prepare for the 1997 transition; in late September 1994, reports circulated that Beijing was also planning to organize a separate Chinese Communist Party committee to supervise the post-1997 Hong Kong administration. Following China's resolution to dissolve the legislature due to be elected in 1995, a subcommittee of the Preliminary Working Committee recommended in October that a "provisional" legislature be chosen by a committee appointed by China until new elections were organized. Each of these developments signaled a departure from the 1984 agreement on the transfer of rule between Britain and China, and each lent credibility to fears that China felt it could alter Hong Kong's legal and political structure with impunity.

Despite this gloomy prospect, human rights activists and legislators pressed for further institutional and legislative reforms to entrench human rights, even while the government dragged its heels, anxious to avoid further confrontation with China. Britain and the Hong Kong government opposed the creation of a human rights commission, despite the explicit endorsement of Legco and the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Lu Ping, China's senior Hong Kong official, promised that China would disband any such commission, and for good measure reiterated that China felt no obligation to discharge the reporting requirements on human rights to the U.N. as required by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (extended to Hong Kong by Britain) after 1997. The governor officially refused to introduce to Legco a private bill to establish such a commission, proposing instead measures to increase human rights education.

A group of legislators led by Christine Loh proposed a law on free public access to officially held information which China opposed, and Governor Patten refused to support it. Instead, the government began preparing a much narrower set of discretionary administrative measures in the form of a code of practice, and announced plans to submit a law giving individuals the right of access to their personal records held by the government.

The government moved slowly on other legal reforms necessary to bring Hong Kong's colonial legislation into line with its Bill of Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and it failed to amend or introduce new provisions in ordinances that concerned censorship, police powers to search for and seize evidence from journalists, sedition, criminal penalties for publication of information relating to investigations of the secretive Independent Commission Against Corruption, or penalties for leaks of government information.

Hong Kong's Basic Law, the so-called constitution for the post-1997 era, stipulates the territory shall prohibit "any act of treason, secession, sedition or subversion" against China or "theft of state secrets." There was strong debate on the need for Hong Kong to reformulate its current laws on treason, sedition, and disclosure of official information, both to bring them into closer conformity with international human rights standards and to ensure they would not expire with the end of British rule, leaving these areas to the discretion of a provisional legislature appointed by Beijing.

The importance of clarifying legal protections for freedom of expression was underscored by China's conviction in 1994 of Xi Yang, a mainland journalist working for the Hong Kong paper Ming Pao who received a twelve-year sentence for allegedly stealing "state secrets."

Journalists throughout Hong Kong participated in several demonstrations protesting the trial of Xi Yang, but the incident provided new opportunities for intimidation and self-censorship. Some publications warned writers not to sign petitions on Xi's behalf or run stories on the incident. In May, Beijing temporarily banned ten Hong Kong reporters, all of whom had signed a letter of protest, from entering China. Hong Kong's director of education appeared to be caught in the self-censorship trend when he recommended that two textbook publishers delete references to the Tiananmen massacre; he reversed this position after intervention by Governor Patten.

The year also saw some of the worst official abuses to date against Vietnamese asylum-seekers, although they fell into a long-established pattern of violations associated with efforts on the part of the Hong Kong government to forcibly repatriate most of the Vietnamese from the prison-like detention centers in the colony. Early in the year, Vietnamese began peaceful hunger-strikes and demonstrations in the detention centers to protest the regional multilateral decision to approve of deportation of non-refugees. Protests against forcible repatriation, however, had been going on for years. The protests alarmed the Hong Kong government, already concerned by the drop in voluntary repatriation, and on April 7, it launched a massive dawn raid on the Whitehead Detention Centre involving some 1,260 officers in full riot gear, for the purpose of moving 1,055 adults and 421 children to another detention center. In the process, the correctional and police officials fired 557 canisters of tear gas at the confined inmates. Over 300 injuries resulted, including burns on small children who were sprayed at point-blank range, and wounds from unprovoked beatings by the officers.

Under pressure from legislators and human rights groups, the governor ordered an independent inquiry, which documented serious abuses. The report, however, made no recommendations as to who was responsible and declined to question the wisdom of the massive police operation in the first place.

Action to hold officers accountable for the brutalities suffered by the Vietnamese did not take place until September 28, when the government announced it would seek prosecution of three low-ranking officers for the assaults at Whitehead, claiming that evidence was insufficient to take action against others.

During the first week of September, 550 armed officers moved against many of the same Vietnamese to break up another nonviolent demonstration, this time in anticipation of the forced deportation of twenty-one asylum seekers. On this occasion, a private monitoring group was allowed to observe the operation. Teargas was again deployed in large quantities and at close range to dislodge protestors from the roofs of huts. In an eerie repetition of the April incident, the government at first misrepresented the number of Vietnamese injured to be only a handful; newspapers ultimately reported well over two hundred injuries and complaints of maltreatment at the hands of the officers in riot gear. At the deportation, Hong Kong authorities forcibly injected tranquilizers into those Vietnamese who had protested return through suicide attempts, wrapping the men in blankets to get them onto the plane to Hanoi.

The Right to Monitor

At present, Hong Kong offers one of the most hospitable environments for local human rights and civil liberties activists in Asia, and these issues receive increasing attention in the local media. In 1994, the Hong Kong Journalists Association, in conjunction with the London-based group, Article 19, published a sequel to its 1993 report on freedom of expression, and several legislators held public hearings on human rights issues, including the police assault on Whitehead.

To its credit, the government protested China's position that it does not feel obliged to continue reports to the United Nations on human rights in Hong Kong, as presently required under the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, to which Britain is a signatory but China is not. The 1984 treaty between Britain and China stipulates that the covenant shall apply to Hong Kong, which would include the covenant's reporting requirement as well.

The government, however, compromised on the public's right to information by opposing visas for two well-known Chinese democracy proponents, Liu Binyan and Ruan Ming, to visit Hong Kong on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Although the government conceded the need for legislation to allow individuals access to dossiers the government keeps on them, it opposed a private bill to also require government departments to provide basic information on their activities to the public on demand.

Media access to Vietnamese confined in detention centers remained limited to those who had volunteered for repatriation, and regulations enforcing censorship and restriction of printed materials remained in force. Reporters were allowed to observe police raids and deportations from a distance, but not to interview the Vietnamese involved. Although the Hong Kong government permitted four independent observers to monitor the September raid, it did not release police videotapes of the action, nor did Legco seek any independent inquiry into the use of tear gas or force. Lawyers and human rights monitors continued to receive access to Vietnamese clients, albeit on restrictive terms, and nongovernmental development agencies continued to have a presence in the detention centers, although their operations are gradually being phased out. Human Rights Watch/Asia expressed concern that the confined and isolated conditions of detention contributed to the sense of desperation in the camps, and increased the danger of violent confrontation.

The Role of the International Community

In the United States, the Clinton administration maintained a conspicuous silence on virtually all major human rights issues connected to Hong Kong during 1994. The U.S. signaled stronger support for forcible repatriation of non-refugees in the region at the regional conference on the Comprehensive Plan of Action (governing policy towards Vietnamese boat people), which Hong Kong authorities took as an endorsement of their deportation policy. No concern was expressed by the State Department over either the April or September police actions against protesting Vietnamese.

Congress, however, took a more critical view of these events. At the House of Representatives Asia-Pacific Subcommittee hearing in April, members of Congress expressed concern over the use of force by Hong Kong authorities and faulty screening practices that left genuine refugees in danger of forced return. In October, fifty-one members of Congress called on President Clinton to take action in egregious cases of individuals wrongly denied refugee protection.

Congressional interest in democratization and human rights in Hong Kong also found expression in a Senate resolution congratulating Hong Kong for its successful district board elections and urging the government to "make every effort to support the progress of democratic reforms...and to encourage all parties to protect these gains as the 1997 transition approaches."

The Work of Human Rights Watch/Asia

Human Rights Watch/Asia continued to work with local human rights and refugee advocates to bring international attention to abuses in Hong Kong in 1994. It began the year by campaigning for the Congressional Human Rights Caucus to urge Governor Patten to establish a human rights commission.

Following the raid on the Whitehead detention facility in April, Human Rights Watch/Asia expressed dismay to the government over the excessive use of force and resultant injuries, and urged a public inquiry and punishment of responsible officials. At the same time, Human Rights Watch/Asia privately urged the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to aggressively monitor such incidents and swiftly and publicly respond to abuses. When the commission of inquiry's report was released in June, Human Rights Watch/Asia voiced disappointment with its failure to assign responsibility for the abuses committed in April. In July, after receiving letters from over a hundred Vietnamese asylum-seekers injured in the raid, Human Rights Watch/Asia urged the Hong Kong secretary of security to pursue vigorously the police inquiry into responsibility for assaults.