Urgent Business: Hong Kong, Freedom of Expression and 1997
enacted in 1934 with the purpose of preventing shopkeepers from disturbing the peace by advertising their wares publicly on the street. There had been no prosecutions under the provision for many years, and it had become routine for the police either to ignore the use of loudhailers (it is common for tour group leaders, for example, to marshall their charges with them) or simply to give warnings to offenders.
The overturning on appeal was greeted as a victory for the rule of law, and for the independence of the judiciary, and an important step in protecting civil liberties. The Chief Justice had ruled that the practice of the police warning people using loudhailers without ever prosecuting them had created a reasonable expectation that prosecution would not result.
4.11.3 Censoring a documentary
This incident involved the docking of a 16 minute 45 second segment from the beginning of a documentary film "Mainland China 1989" which was shown to the public in December 1989. The film was part of a programme of works by the Taiwanese photographer and film- maker Chang Chao-tang put on by the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Assembled in different segments, the censored opening piece entitled "They are Writing History" dealt with the student movement and its suppression on 4 June. According to the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA), the government body which enforces film censorship, the segment amounted to propaganda.
Under the Film Censorship Ordinance, TELA may prohibit or censor a film on political grounds if it believes the film may "seriously damage good relations with other territories", the other territory, of course, in most cases being China. A controversial law, the Ordinance was enacted in 1988 to legalize the government's long-standing though unlawful practice of censoring films to appease China. This was its first usage since 1988 that clearly ignored the direction in the relevant section to censors to "take into account" the terms of Article 19 of the ICCPR when assessing films. The Ordinance does not make it binding on the censorship authorities to follow the terms of Article 19 in their decisions.
An appeal by the Arts Centre to allow a full screening of the film on the grounds that Article 19 had been ignored was turned down. The review board again decided that the film was likely "to seriously damage relations with other territories", and its chairman, Hong Kong University professor Poon Chung-kwong, again cited the reason of propaganda, saying the decision was a matter of timing: it was the right time for the authorities to show Beijing there were limits to its toleration of "subversion" against the Chinese government.
An unnamed official told the Far Eastern Economic Review in early 1990 that "the price to pay" for censoring 16 minutes from a Taiwanese documentary on the China protests in 1989
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