The two leading journalists' groups in Hong Kong say they are urging the United Nations to set up a task force to investigate the police's targeted violence against media workers, which are condoned by authorities.



Media workers had been facing ever-increasing threats to personal safety and obstruction by the police since the city's protest movement began in June last year, the Hong Kong Journalists Association and Hong Kong Press Photographers Association said in a letter sent to the UN's Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

The two associations told of reporters being subjected to arbitrary stop-and-search orders around protest scenes, and described how police officers over the past year even attacked reporters and intimidated them with detentions and arrests when the reporters were merely performing their duties.



Citing their own survey, the associations said more than 80% of the journalist respondents reported having personally experienced varying degrees of police violence, and that the police's obstruction of media work had become more systematic, targeted and common since the beginning of this year. Reporters are now subject to searches, dispersal and even detention in the name of identity verification, according to the letter.



The Independent Police Complaints Council, the city's police watchdog, had so far received 143 complaints from media groups and workers, according to the letter. The groups expressed discontent with the IPCC's protest movement report, publicized in May, which did not comment on police officers' behavior and instead highlighted the presence of "fake journalists" at protest sites, which the groups said were "groundless accusations."



The lack of redress in the current system proved the UN's long-standing concerns on Hong Kong's lack of an independent mechanism to handle complaints about the police, the letter wrote.



The associations urged the UN to send a task force to Hong Kong to look into the matter. The task force could exert pressure on the authorities to start an independent inquiry into police brutality and to disclose the number of complaints the police had received and the number of officers punished, they said.



The force's internal Complaints Against Police Office receives and handles all complaints about police officers. It decides what cases need to be reported to the IPCC, which has no power to launch its own investigation and mainly reviews complaint reports filed by the office.

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