Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s besieged chief executive unilaterally decided to appeal to the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to prohibit the usage of face masks and other such coverings at public gatherings. The Prohibition on Face Covering Regulation makes it’s a criminal offense that is punishable by one year of imprisonment for people to hide their faces using ways that avoid identification even if they are participants of lawful meetings or marches. The city’s leader has announced this emergency law to restore order.
The city has always respected the rule of the law and it is one of the attributes that makes Hong Kong stand apart from cities on the Chinese mainland. Their legal system’s certainty and its freedom from political interference guarantees that no one would fall victim to the illogical exercise of power by government authorities.
Mrs. Lam has said that the ban was designed to stop violence and restore order but this step of hers only ended up adding fuel to the fire. Thousands of people wearing masks paraded the streets even after the service was suspended across the entire underground system and there were clashes with the police.
The ordinance is an ancient statue from 1922 when Hong Kong used to be a British colony and the acts of the city’s governor were regulated by the monarchy in Britain. Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, it has had its Constitution, the Basic Law which has the principle of “One Country, Two Systems” that was used to protect the city’s autonomy. Article 39 said that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights would continue to apply in Hong Kong after 1997 and Article 73 confers the legislative power of Hong Kong in the Legislative Council. Also, Article 8 says that any laws previously in force that disregard the Basic Law cannot be maintained. Mrs. Lam violated all of these provisions with the appeal she made. Mrs. Lam announced the ban by authority and with that Hong Kong has moved closer to becoming an authoritarian regime that would be ruled at the executive’s pleasure without any institutional or systemic safeguards.
The petition of the emergency ordinance is unlawful and hence the face-mask ban should be considered annulled and Mrs. Lam was aware of this fact and that she might lose any judicial review of the law’s constitutionality. She reportedly was reluctant to pass the measure but she suddenly passed it just three days after returning from Beijing. It has been said that President Xi Jinping might have given her the marching order. The Chinese Communist Party ( C.C.P) has been haunted by the images of millions of peaceful marchers taking to the streets of Hong Kong so the authorities calculated that if masks are banned, future rallies may be smaller. The ban was also designed to provoke the more radical factions of the protest movement into escalating violence.
Face protection is a type of personal protection equipment that is used to cover and protect the face at hazardous locations. Rising accidents and causalities at manufacturing facilities is driving the demand for face protection equipment. Various regulation and standards imposed for personal protection are generating huge demand for face protection equipment for the people as per a report published by Value Market Research.
The authorities hope that Hong Kongers may distance themselves from the movement because of the increased social costs and that the movement may lose some of the moral authority it seems to command with liberal democracies around the world. Another explanation is that further violence on the streets could possibly become an excuse to impose a curfew and pass other emergency regulations.
Legislators from the democratic camp have begun a legal battle challenging Mrs. Lam’s ordinance and are checking if it can be reviewed judicially. It has been said that they knew that “One Country, Two Systems” is dying but the law is dying too. Alan Leong Kah-kit, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association and former member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, is chairman of the Civic Party.
Naira Shekhawat has been into Content Writing just after completing her Graduation in English Literature. Her love for words has won her many accolades in her respective jobs ever since. Naira covers business sections for VMR News. She is a traveller by heart and loves writing on food blogs as a freelancer.