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HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
2 of the Bill proposes to introduce a prohibition against bringing into the Colony hereafter any mui tsai. That prohibition will be subject to two limitations, one a permanent one which will appear in the Ordinance, and the other a temporary one which will depend upon the administration of the Ordinance. The permanent limitation is that mui tsai who have been previously in the Colony and have been registered may, if they are taken out of the Colony, be brought back again. It seems obvious that that limitation must be be allowed. If the mui tsai has lived here many years, possibly happily and contentedly, and the household to which she belongs is a Hong Kong household, it would be very unreasonable to her employers, and probably injurious to the interests of the girl herself, if she were not allowed to return to the Colony after a visit else- where. I hope that that privilege of being allowed to bring back mui tsai who have been here and have been registered will act as an inducement to registration, because if an unregistered mui tsai is taken out she cannot be brought back again. I should like to add that the regulations which are at present in draft provide that before any mui tsai can be taken out of the Colony a report must be made to the Secretary for Chinese Affairs and the girl must be produced before him.
The temporary limitation of this new section 4 (a) is intended to meet the case of mui tsai who may be temporarily out of the Colony at the time when registration first comes into force. There, again, it would be unreasonable, I submit, and unfair to the girl, that she should be for ever debarred from coming back to the place which is her real home, and as the consent of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs is required to any prosecution under the Ordinance, he will be able to control the administration of this section, and for a short while after the introduction of registration he will not enforce the section in the case of mui tsai who really belong to Hong Kong and are brought back here after a temporary stay outside the Colony, provided that on their return the employers take the necessary steps to register the girls promptly under the Ordinance.
It
Clause 3 of the Bill repeals two sections of the principal Ordinance. At first sight that might seem like a weakening of the safeguards of the principal Ordinance but instead of being a weakening it is, I think, rather a strengthening of those safeguards. Section 7 of the principal Ordinance was inserted in the Ordinance during its passage through the Committee stage of this Council. provides that in every prosecution for overwork or ill-treatment of a mui tsai medical evidence shall be given before a magistrate as to the injuries received by the mui tsai and that the magistrate must find whether such ill-treatment amounted in his opinion to gross cruelty or not. If he finds there was gross cruelty then the offender must not be given the option of a fine but must be sentenced to imprisonment without that option. intention of course was to secure adequate punishment for cases of The obvious gross cruelty. There are, however, two dangers in this section.
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