؟
No law or administrative rules and regulations shall contravene the Constitution".
Nothing in the Constitution indicates that article 5 can be
suspended. Thus, neither the Basic Law nor
exempted or
laws of Hong Kong can
constitution. 66
ultimately contravene the Chinese
There is nothing unorthodox in this. An autonomous
region of Australia, if it could be created by the Australian
Parliament under the Australian constitution, would be
ultimately subject to a repeal of the instrument creating
it. Nothing the Australian Parliament could do under the
constitution could prevent such repeal. It could promise not
to do So for fifty years. But if it broke that promise, there would no legal barrier to its doing so. The promise is
a political commitment to the people of Hong Kong. It rests
on the politics, personnel and institutions of the PRC. It
does not rest on law, at least on any law which can be
enforced under the constitution of the PRC. This reality
must be clearly faced.
Condemnations in China of the notions of the rule of
law derive in part from the different approach to the
interpretation of legislation adopted by the constitution of
that country. It was partly
partly for reasons of history and
partly by accident that the notion of judicial review
developed in the common law tradition. The history is found
in the early decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council by which, even before the American Revolution, laws
of the colonies were sometimes struck down by judges as invalid when they were found to be incompatible with laws made in Westminster. It was this judicial empowerment which
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