The Hong Kong police secretly amended its rules to exempt officers from displaying their identification numbers on their uniforms, it was revealed in a court hearing over the force’s conduct during the year-long social unrest that has embroiled the city.



Senior Counsel Hectar Pun told High Court Justice Anderson Chow that the police had changed several clauses in the Police General Orders last November to exempt officers from showing their IDs while carrying out their duties. The amendment had never been announced to the public, he said.



Pun was representing Chan Kung-shun, Lo Cham-sze and Ng Hong-luen in a judicial review against the police’s practice of not displaying officer IDs. The court has grouped together other similar applications from Chan Ki-kau, Kwok Cheuk-kin, Baggio Leung, Yeung Tsz-chun and the Hong Kong Journalists Association.



The applications all came from prominent figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Chan, 74, went on a hunger strike last year against the now-withdrawn extradition bill; Kwok, 80, is known for challenging the government in court on numerous occasions; Leung, a 33-year-old activist, was stripped of his seat in the city’s legislature following an oath deemed inappropriate by the government in 2016; and Yeung, a 30-year-old teacher, was hit in his right eye by a projectile in a protest last year.



In the hearing on Wednesday, Pun cited police documents that showed a new system had been put in place from Nov. 27 last year. According to these documents, if deemed suitable by a superintendent during an operation, riot officers could replace the strips of cloth displaying their ID numbers with blue cards indicating their units. The rule is not applicable to officers above the station sergeant rank. The new system would be in place until further notice, the document said.



Another change to the police rulebook was that plain-clothes officers would also be exempt from showing their ID cards if requested by a member of the public. The right to refusal was previously only applicable to uniformed officers under certain circumstances.



The new rules have not been publicly announced and, as of Wednesday afternoon, the online version of the Police General Orders had yet to be updated.



Secretary for Security John Lee previously told the city’s legislature that there was no space in riot police gear to display officers’ IDs. The claim was repeated in a submission to court by a chief inspector. Senior Counsel Martin Lee, representing Chan and Yeung, said the claim was “insulting” to Justice Chow’s intelligence.



Lee said it was unreasonable that the police had not explained when and why the rules were changed.

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