tim's experiment

Considering that Hong Kong prides itself on enjoying the rule of law. it comes as a surprise to find that a whole category of laws have been allowed to fall into disuse from neglect.

Some months ago I complained that the reporting in the Hong Kong media of an unusually interesting divorce case had clearly breached the ordinance which purports to regulate the reporting of divorce proceedings. The law says that certain things may be reported, and no others. In this case the judge first made an order that some things should not be reported, though they are on the list permitted by the Ordinance. Later in the case he seems to have dropped the order, and everything was reported, including many interesting items which were not supposed to be. My letter to the editor of Pravda asking what as going on was neither responded to nor printed.

I tried sending an inquiring email to the Department of Justice. After a few days pause for thought this produced the reply that the Department only considers prosecutions in cases referred to it by the police. The responder added rather gratuitously that the department was not in the business of giving legal advice to inquirers. This was quite unnecessary. It is widely believed that the department is staffed almost entirely by people who are too lazy or too stupid to make it in the private sector. Nobody who has a choice will seek legal advice from them. All I wanted to know was what the department was doing about this particular ordinance, and the answer was essentially: nothing.

This conceals a change in policy. When I was an editor the Legal Department, as it then was, regularly monitored newspapers. A short detour into media law is necessary here. The two big hazards for newspapers are libel and contempt of court. Libel cases are pursued by the victims, if they can afford it; contempt cases are usually initiated by the judge in the court concerned. But there is also a set of restrictions imposed by statute on the reporting of various kinds of court cases. In juvenile court reports you may not give any clue to the identity of the defendant. In committal proceedings, as in divorce cases, there is a list of permitted items and everything else is banned. In cases involving sex you are not supposed to give clues to the identity of the victim. If a juvenile appears in an adult court jointly charged with an adult you are supposed to conceal his identity, which may lead to a very complicated situation. Anyway, when I was an editor these restrictions were policed by the then Legal Department. Newspapers which infringed were cautioned and even occasionally prosecuted. This kept the relevant laws in people’s memories and they were generally observed.

Contemplating the rather unhelpful reply from the Department of Justice I wondered what was going on. One possibility was that a popular judge on the brink of retirement had dropped a brick and everyone was pretending not to notice. However last week I ran into a very experienced court reporter and I was told that the situation is actually more serious.

The Department of Justice has stopped monitoring newspapers. As a result if you infringe the statutory restriction on reporting, you are neither cautioned nor prosecuted. Consequently they are infringed with increasing frequency. Details are reported from commital proceedings which should not be; people who should not be pictured (like the mother of a rape victim) are pictured, clues to the identity of juvenile victims of sex offenders (like the school they attended) are given. And nothing happens. All the restrictions outlined above have effectively become dead letters. I did ask some police friends if they were monitoring newspapers for infringements of this kind and they rolled on the floor laughing.

I suppose there is an argument that in this wired age the idea that information can be suppressed by keeping it out of newspapers is a quaint antique. If it’s not in Apple Daily it will be on Youtube or Facebook. So why bother? This may be a good argument for abolishing the laws concerned. But that is not what is going to happen. Actually I have seen this movie before so I can tell you what will happen. The situation will continue to deteriorate steadily until a case comes up involving some well-connected individual who really doesn’t want publicity. The Department of Justice will then swing into action and prosecute offending media, pointing out that the laws concerned are of great antiquity and should have been observed. There will be a wave of public revulsion and the defendants’ pleas that the law has not been enforced for two decades will fall on deaf judicial ears.

So it will all end in tears. In the meantime Hong Kong is not a good place to be a rape victim.