The police amended the Police General Orders all at once the other day, redefining “media representatives” , revoking the validity of membership cards issued by the Hong Kong Journalists Association or the Hong Kong Press Photographers Association. In other words, reporters have to be “dealt in” by the government, which further suppresses freedom of the press and hedges about reporters covering events. Though it is objected by the press unanimously, such an abuse of power is just one example among all having happened in the past that were settled by being left unsettled under the absolute authority of the police. With nearly all media outlets having taken sides and the management and proprietors of them being apparently pro-establishment, what journalists can do is limited. That is also why recently the Hong Kong communist regime has unscrupulously been doing things in a perverse manner and swearing black is white on end.

Despite Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal Geoffrey Ma Tao Li issuing a statement to stress judiciary institutions should not be politicized, or legal professionals proclaiming they would stand guard over judiciary independence, it is known that the root cause of the problem lies in the fact that recently the Chinese Communist Party has been tampering history, claiming there is no separation of power but only absolute power in Hong Kong. And top officials of the SAR government, like Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng Yeuk Wah, have even been deceiving themselves and others by asserting that despite absence of separation of powers, judiciary independence is not influenced. That is unarguably a lie – without checks and balances, how can the court stop abuse of authority?

The court in the U.S. can abrogate the U.S. government’s executive order to impose a ban on WeChat. Can the courts in Hong Kong do so? Among all the similar judicial reviews, the courts wielded the principle of separation of powers as a beacon for adjudication. If the principle had not existed, what else could have been based on in giving a ruling? To make a compromise in the argument, even though election campaign runners that have unreasonably been disqualified by a returning officer win the lawsuit in a judicial review, the returning officer, who keeps on squandering public money by illicitly disqualifying candidates and nullifying by-elections with impunity is responsible for nothing. The media will not even bother to denounce it.

A few years ago, people from all walks of life would query the “selective law enforcement” by the police and the Secretary for Justice. Now that it has become the new normal, and the police have even enforced the Securities and Futures Ordinance, which is inside the remit of the Securities and Futures Commission, by arresting 15 people for “manipulating” Next Media’s stock price in defiance of a memorandum signed by both bodies, issues like this have suggested that currently everything can be politicized by the government and its law enforcement arms. Worse still, the government and the royalists that take the initiative to politicize everything are fond of covering up thier misdeeds by shifting the blame on others, carrying out politicization on the one hand while accusing others of conducting politicization on the other hand.

The result of the government always taking the lead to abuse public power regardless of legality is the public credibility of every policy it proposes crashes and the government functionaries are just a bunch of “liars” in the eye of the public. Examples are more than abundant: the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) and the police are directing the social gathering ban at yellow shops relentlessly, impeding legal eateries operating by enforcing public power; the police are turning a blind eye to pro-government demonstrations time and again while only seeing pro-democracy rallies; the saying that the police were absent from the scene on July 21 last year for 39 mins had been withdrawn and changed to 18 mins a year later, and the police officers were then asked to shut up by the high echelon personnel. Miraculous, isn’t it?

Therefore, as long as the government insists on working its way through, queries from the public about its expansion of power in hand are inevitable. Recently, while seven environmental organizations have shown support for the so-called waste charging scheme initiated by the government, citizens have queried if the practice of selective law enforcement by the police is applicable to waste charging. In those days when environmental organizations supported the government passing the proposal to ban idling vehicles with running engines, what the government did in the end was to charge the driver of the vehicle leading the 7.1 demonstration with breaching the law. Not long ago, some environmental groups complained about the police abusing the social gathering ban to crack down on rallies in the name of the epidemic. In view of this, will the police enforce the law on behalf of the FEHD, dropping by door-to-door to “check for garbage”? In light of an expansive gray zone in law enforcement, it is not difficult to imagine that power abusers will knock at the doors of people, thorns in their flesh, harassing them in the name of any contention concerning the waste charging scheme that relates to a lot of privacy. Unfortunately it happens that a lot of NGOs disregard what the government has done thus far, fantasizing about the government still being able to “initiate policies” like what it used to do.

After the government has wrecked every possible discussion about its policies, abusing all its power in hand, the only choice left to citizens is to object to any policy empowering the government to do anything. Every well-meaning legislation can be used to help the tyrant victimize his subjects; power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, when the government taking the lead to encourage corruption and abuse of power, not only will the opposition faction suffer, but also those deeming themselves moderates or those claiming  “I hate politics” will get into trouble without any political reasons. While corruption has been rooted, coupled with the intricacy of the interest groups, there is no more wiggle room for decent discussion or rectification. This is today’s Hong Kong, where the police is empowered with absolute authority without checks and balances.

(Kay Lam, commentator)

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