XN000022-1996-12-18 — Page 28

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Official Secrets Bill

Following is the speech by the Secretary for Security, Mr Peter Lai, in moving the second reading of the Official Secrets Bill in the Legislative Council today (Wednesday):

Mr President,

I move the Second Reading of the Official Secrets Bill,

This Bill localises the provisions of the UK Official Secrets Acts currently applying to Hong Kong. These Acts will lapse on 1 July 1997; we thus need to introduce local legislation to replace them.

The Bill deals with two broad categories of offences: espionage, and unlawful disclosure of official information. In drafting the Bill, we have modified various provisions in the Acts to reflect local circumstances. For the unlawful disclosure offences, the Bill covers six key areas of information: security and intelligence, defence, international relations, information obtained in confidence from other states or international organisations, crime, and special investigations under statutory warrants. These areas of information, if disclosed without lawful authority, would cause or be likely to cause substantial harm to the public interest.

There are a number of provisions in the Acts which have not been reproduced in the Bill. These include provisions dealing with matters already covered in other Hong Kong legislation, such as the power of arrest. We have also removed an outdated provision which requires persons in the business of receiving postal packets to register with the Police. We have, in addition, included a new safeguard in the provision requiring a person to give information to the Police about suspected espionage, to ensure that the information he gives cannot be used against him in criminal proceedings.

We have not included from the UK Acts the rebuttable presumption of purpose in relation to espionage, by which a person's guilty purpose is presumed in certain circumstances unless he can prove otherwise. This sort of presumption is out of step with current Hong Kong legislative practice, and there is no merit in retaining it in the localised legislation.

There have been some suggestions that "public interest" and "prior disclosure" defences should be included in the Bill. Such defences, which do not exist in other common law jurisdictions, are not a feature of the existing Acts applying to Hong Kong. As I have mentioned, the Bill specifies six areas of protected information; we believe that, given the nature of the information concerned, any unauthorised disclosure would of itself be likely to harm the public interest. To provide statutorily for a "public interest" defence for disclosing information relating to matters under one of these areas set out in the legislation would be contradictory.

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