Hong Kong’s legislative head has taken the official line that “separation of powers” is not stipulated in the Basic Law, rejecting the idea that the executive, the legislature and the judiciary are three independent branches of government in the city.

Andrew Leung, president of the Legislative Council, was the latest to weigh in on the two-week-old debate after Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung and Chief Executive Carrie Lam caused controversy by successively claiming that the city did not have separation of powers and instead practiced only division of labour among government branches.

Leung said he could not see the term “separation of powers” in the text or related literature of the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution. It was clearly written that the executive authorities, the legislature and the judiciary should complement, and keep checks and balances on, one another’s functions, he said.

He emphasised that the legislature worked according to the Basic Law and the debate over separation of powers was not important. “No matter how you describe it, people will have different interpretations. But the facts cannot depart from the Basic Law,” Leung said on a radio program on Saturday.

Speaking on the increasingly polarised society and the worsening relationship between the legislature and the executive in the past four years, Leung said: “Everyone is responsible… It takes two hands to clap.”

He suggested that if lawmakers of different political parties and leanings had opinions about topics on the legislative agenda, they should raise their questions early on the legislature’s Bills Committee to speed up the process of enactment.

Leung also claimed to maintain good communication with different parties, “without which, how could a bill be passed in five minutes?”

He described the vandalism of the Legislative Council on July 1 last year as most infuriating and condemned the protests at that time for obstructing the work of the legislature. As for whether he would remain as president in the next term, “let’s see how it goes next year,” he said.

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