A Hong Kong court has disqualified four pro-democracy lawmakers for failing to sincerely take the oath of office, a huge blow to the territory’s opposition.
The four lawmakers — Nathan Law (羅冠聰), Lau Siu-lai (劉小麗), Edward Yiu (姚松炎) and Leung Kwok-hung (梁國雄) — all modified their oaths of allegiance to China during a swearing-in ceremony in October last year.
Their disqualifications mean the pro-democracy camp has lost its veto power over major legislation, one of its most powerful tools in a Legislative Council stacked with pro-establishment lawmakers.
Photo: AP
The verdict is sure to have a chilling effect on political speech among those agitating for greater democracy, discouraging open challenges to the Chinese government.
Law’s political party, Demosisto, condemned “the manifest interference of the Beijing government to cripple Hong Kong’s legislative power.”
“More than 180,000 voters had their voices silenced in the legislative body,” the party added. “It is more important than ever for Hong Kong to stay strong and firm against the autocracy.”
Lau’s slow-motion reading of the oath — she paused for six seconds between each word, taking 10 minutes to read the 77-word declaration — “would objectively and unquestionably lead a reasonable person to conclude that she did not intend to convey any meaning of the contents and pledges of the LegCo [Legislative Council] oath when reading it out,” Justice Thomas Au wrote in his judgement.
Barring Leung — who held a yellow umbrella during his oath, a symbol of the territory’s 2014 democracy protests, and chanted calls for direct elections for Hong Kong’s leader — Au wrote: “The manner in which Mr Leung took the oath goes well outside an objective reasonable range of such requisite solemnity and sincerity.”
Yiu added words into the middle of his first attempt to take the oath, rendering it invalid in the eyes of the law, Au ruled.
The judge also ruled that Law’s comments before his oath showed his was insincere. Law prefaced his oath with a quote from Ghandi and a pledge to serve Hong Kongers.
The disqualifications come after two popularly elected pro-independence legislators were ejected in November last year.
Their oaths, in which they pledged allegiance to the “Hong Kong nation” and used an expletive to refer to China, were ruled invalid and they were barred from taking their seats.
The protest by Yau Wai-ching (游蕙禎) and Sixtus “Baggio” Leung (梁頌恆) prompted Beijing to rewrite the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, in a rare and highly controversial move that sparked street protests.
The move was the most direct intervention in the territory’s politics since Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997 and it dealt a major blow to a campaign led by the younger generation for greater autonomy or outright independence.
The Chinese government declared that those wishing to hold public office must “sincerely and solemnly” declare allegiance to China. Lawmakers are required to swear allegiance to the “the Hong Kong special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China.”
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