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Ordinance from challenge under the Bill of Rights for at
least a year.
10. This timetable means that the amended Ordinance, which
is probably incompatible with the ICCPR, would become public only one week after the presentation to the UN Human Rights
Committee in New York of the Third Periodic Report on Hong
Kong (1-3 April) and only a few days after the Secretary of
State's own visit to Hong Kong and China (2-9 April). On current plans, the amended Ordinance would also have its
second and third readings in LegCo on 24 April, only one week before the planned enactment of the Bill of Rights,
which will incorporate the ICCPR as applied to Hong Kong into domestic legislation.
Argument
Why the Hong Kong Government need to introduce the proposed
amendments
11. The option of continuing with the existing arrangements is no longer tenable in the light of the number of legal challenges to Hong Kong's existing legislation which have already been mounted and the risk of further challenges to the policy of detention itself or the length of detention. The Hong Kong Government therefore need to introduce the proposed amendments for the following reasons:
(a) If the courts were to rule that the detention of some or all of the 44,000 Vietnamese currently detained in Hong Kong was not legal under the existing law, the Hong Kong Government could be faced with the prospect of having to permit thousands of Vietnamese to live in open camps, with free access to the the territory. This would have serious implications for public order. But far more serious would be the likelihood that many more Vietnamese, possibly in their tens of thousands, would set off for Hong Kong, once
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