催淚摧心｜戴啟思
蘋果日報 2019/12/04 11:00
專欄戴啟思人物
Thou feedest them with the bread of tears; and givest them tears to drink in great measure.
Psalms 80.5
Many people have been fed with the bread of tears in great measure over the past few months and have been worried about it.
The other week the Secretary for Food and Health, Sophia Chan, was quizzed in Legco about possible public health issues arising from the use of tear gas by the Police Force over the past few months.
She attempted to reassure lawmakers. She said that there was nothing really to worry about possible toxic effects of tear gas.
However, she had only limited information about the chemical constituents of the stinging smoke clouds that have wafted down our streets and across public places for the past few months. She cited a need to maintain the operational capabilities of the Police Force.
This limitation on what she would say about tear gas deprived her statement of much of the effect it was meant to have.
Tear gas is a chemical weapon. An international treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which has near-universal acceptance-only four states do not subscribe to the convention- regulates its use because it can be a severe hazard to health.
The Secretary of Food and Health should be the first person in the Government to know all about tear gas and its effects. The public needs to be satisfied that its use in the streets or enclosed spaces like MTR stations is safe and it can only be satisfied if it knows the facts.
Armies in the First World War developed tear gas and more deadly gases as weapons of war. They were used extensively and caused many thousands of casualties.
The lesson learned in that conflict was that tear-gassing the other side's troops almost invariably provoked retaliation with more of the same and, where they were available, even with deadly gases such as Phosgene and Mustard Gas. The idea was to neutralise your enemy more effectively by using lethal gases before he tried to gas you again.
This almost invariable progression to lethal force using gas weapons was reckoned to be too terrible to contemplate. Entire armies might be wiped out by airborne toxins with a silent death being dealt out collaterally to the civilian population living near to battlefields.
Although they were never used in the First World War, some countries had the knowledge and capability to manufacture biological weapons such as anthrax bombs which were genuinely horrifying.
After the war, the international community banned the use of deadly gas weapons in armed conflict, including biological weapons, by a convention concluded in Geneva in 1925.
The agreement included a ban on tear gas and other non-lethal gases because of this risk of unacceptable escalation to deadly gases during a conflict. However, the convention included an exception for states to use tear gas for internal policing operations to deal with violent civilian disturbances.
The reasoning behind the exception was that deploying tear gas was a more humane measure than the Police having to use deadly weapons such as hand-guns, shotguns and rifles.
Further, the risk of retaliation with deadly force feared on the battlefield, including lethal and non-lethal gases, was virtually non-existent because the State had a monopoly on the use of weapons. Any conflict would be one-sided. Civilians, it was thought, would not have the resources to raise the stakes against the Police in a civil disturbance by any significant escalation of violence.
The international community continued the ban on using tear gases in wartime and renewed the exception about use by police forces when the CWC came into effect in 1997.
The CWC works like this. Article III(1)(e) of the convention requires states to report the existence of 'Riot Control Agents' (RCA's). The Article defines RCA's in Article II(7) as 'any chemical not listed in a Schedule, which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure'.
States fill in declarations that they send to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. A 2013 handbook guides States about making RCA declarations.
Unless the RCA contains one of three named chemical agents, the handbook says that a State is obliged to give details about any RCA it possesses. The guide also says that 'the chemical name, structural formula and CAS registry number, if assigned, should be provided'. (A CAS number is a unique identifier that enables cross-checking with a comprehensive registry of chemicals maintained by the Chemical Abstracts Service in the USA.)
The purpose of supplying this detailed information to the OPCW is to enable experts in the Organization to examine the chemical agents in a declared RCA to see if the agents fit the description in Article II (7) of the CWC.
The surprising thing is that not all declarations made by States about RCAs conform to the description of an RCA in Article II (7).
In November 2018 the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the OPCW prepared a report on 60 chemicals in RCA's that had been the subject of declarations by States. Only 17 declared RCA's could be said to conform to the description in the Article. In other words, when States used these 43 non-compliant RCA's they were using them outside the CWC.
The SAB report about the 43 chemical agents that do not comply with the Article is a highly technical document. Still, it makes clear that some RCA's that do not conform to the definition in the Article can be very dangerous.
For instance, two chemical agents used in some RCA's included arsenical agents. The SAB noted that these had been used in the First World War to cause 'sensory irritation and harm to life processes'.
Other non-compliant RCA's did not cause lasting severe harm. Still, they could incapacitate for up to 48 hours which was not consistent with effects 'disappearing within a short time' as required by definition in Article II (7).
The SAB report identifies the 17 compliant RCA's and lists them on a website maintained by the OPCW: see SAB poster on definition of a riot control agent www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/Science_Technology/riot_control_agents_poster.pdf.
China ratified the CWC in 1997, and it applies the convention to the HKSAR. It appears to me that it is legitimate to ask the Secretary for Food and Health whether China has made a declaration under CWC about RCA's in Hong Kong.
If it has made a declaration-and, there is no reason to suppose it has not-the the next question is to ask whether the declared RCA's appear on the SAB list of chemical agents that conform to the Article VII(2) definition.
If RCA's used in the HKSAR come within that definition, then all well and good.
If RCA's used in the HKSAR do not appear in the definition, then the Secretary of Food and Health has a problem. She needs to explain why the Police Force needs to use non-compliant RCA's. She also needs to tell the public what health risks arise from the use of these chemical agents.
Her answers may not reassure the public if the Police Force has been using non-compliant RCA's, but the public has a right to know if there are health hazards and it can expect the Government to act to address the problem.
－
About the author
Philip Dykes is a Senior Counsel. He has lived in Hong Kong for over thirty years. His interests are in literature, language, history, fine art and photography. He worked as government lawyer until 1992 and he is now in private practice.
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Many people have been fed with the bread of tears in great measure over the past few months and have been worried about it.
The other week the Secretary for Food and Health, Sophia Chan, was quizzed in Legco about possible public health issues arising from the use of tear gas by the Police Force over the past few months.
She attempted to reassure lawmakers. She said that there was nothing really to worry about possible toxic effects of tear gas.
However, she had only limited information about the chemical constituents of the stinging smoke clouds that have wafted down our streets and across public places for the past few months. She cited a need to maintain the operational capabilities of the Police Force.
This limitation on what she would say about tear gas deprived her statement of much of the effect it was meant to have.
Tear gas is a chemical weapon. An international treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which has near-universal acceptance-only four states do not subscribe to the convention- regulates its use because it can be a severe hazard to health.
The Secretary of Food and Health should be the first person in the Government to know all about tear gas and its effects. The public needs to be satisfied that its use in the streets or enclosed spaces like MTR stations is safe and it can only be satisfied if it knows the facts.
Armies in the First World War developed tear gas and more deadly gases as weapons of war. They were used extensively and caused many thousands of casualties.
The lesson learned in that conflict was that tear-gassing the other side's troops almost invariably provoked retaliation with more of the same and, where they were available, even with deadly gases such as Phosgene and Mustard Gas. The idea was to neutralise your enemy more effectively by using lethal gases before he tried to gas you again.
This almost invariable progression to lethal force using gas weapons was reckoned to be too terrible to contemplate. Entire armies might be wiped out by airborne toxins with a silent death being dealt out collaterally to the civilian population living near to battlefields.
Although they were never used in the First World War, some countries had the knowledge and capability to manufacture biological weapons such as anthrax bombs which were genuinely horrifying.
After the war, the international community banned the use of deadly gas weapons in armed conflict, including biological weapons, by a convention concluded in Geneva in 1925.
The agreement included a ban on tear gas and other non-lethal gases because of this risk of unacceptable escalation to deadly gases during a conflict. However, the convention included an exception for states to use tear gas for internal policing operations to deal with violent civilian disturbances.
The reasoning behind the exception was that deploying tear gas was a more humane measure than the Police having to use deadly weapons such as hand-guns, shotguns and rifles.
Further, the risk of retaliation with deadly force feared on the battlefield, including lethal and non-lethal gases, was virtually non-existent because the State had a monopoly on the use of weapons. Any conflict would be one-sided. Civilians, it was thought, would not have the resources to raise the stakes against the Police in a civil disturbance by any significant escalation of violence.
The international community continued the ban on using tear gases in wartime and renewed the exception about use by police forces when the CWC came into effect in 1997.
The CWC works like this. Article III(1)(e) of the convention requires states to report the existence of 'Riot Control Agents' (RCA's). The Article defines RCA's in Article II(7) as 'any chemical not listed in a Schedule, which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure'.
States fill in declarations that they send to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. A 2013 handbook guides States about making RCA declarations.
Unless the RCA contains one of three named chemical agents, the handbook says that a State is obliged to give details about any RCA it possesses. The guide also says that 'the chemical name, structural formula and CAS registry number, if assigned, should be provided'. (A CAS number is a unique identifier that enables cross-checking with a comprehensive registry of chemicals maintained by the Chemical Abstracts Service in the USA.)
The purpose of supplying this detailed information to the OPCW is to enable experts in the Organization to examine the chemical agents in a declared RCA to see if the agents fit the description in Article II (7) of the CWC.
The surprising thing is that not all declarations made by States about RCAs conform to the description of an RCA in Article II (7).
In November 2018 the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the OPCW prepared a report on 60 chemicals in RCA's that had been the subject of declarations by States. Only 17 declared RCA's could be said to conform to the description in the Article. In other words, when States used these 43 non-compliant RCA's they were using them outside the CWC.
The SAB report about the 43 chemical agents that do not comply with the Article is a highly technical document. Still, it makes clear that some RCA's that do not conform to the definition in the Article can be very dangerous.
For instance, two chemical agents used in some RCA's included arsenical agents. The SAB noted that these had been used in the First World War to cause 'sensory irritation and harm to life processes'.
Other non-compliant RCA's did not cause lasting severe harm. Still, they could incapacitate for up to 48 hours which was not consistent with effects 'disappearing within a short time' as required by definition in Article II (7).
The SAB report identifies the 17 compliant RCA's and lists them on a website maintained by the OPCW: see SAB poster on definition of a riot control agent www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/Science_Technology/riot_control_agents_poster.pdf.
China ratified the CWC in 1997, and it applies the convention to the HKSAR. It appears to me that it is legitimate to ask the Secretary for Food and Health whether China has made a declaration under CWC about RCA's in Hong Kong.
If it has made a declaration-and, there is no reason to suppose it has not-the the next question is to ask whether the declared RCA's appear on the SAB list of chemical agents that conform to the Article VII(2) definition.
If RCA's used in the HKSAR come within that definition, then all well and good.
If RCA's used in the HKSAR do not appear in the definition, then the Secretary of Food and Health has a problem. She needs to explain why the Police Force needs to use non-compliant RCA's. She also needs to tell the public what health risks arise from the use of these chemical agents.
Her answers may not reassure the public if the Police Force has been using non-compliant RCA's, but the public has a right to know if there are health hazards and it can expect the Government to act to address the problem.
－
About the author
Philip Dykes is a Senior Counsel. He has lived in Hong Kong for over thirty years. His interests are in literature, language, history, fine art and photography. He worked as government lawyer until 1992 and he is now in private practice.
探索驚奇精彩的 wONdEr 故事，請LIKE 我們的Facebook Page，並設定為「搶先看」：
https://www.facebook.com/wondermedia.hk/