A strange, indeed barely believable, controversy has erupted over a question which appears hardly disputable: whether Hong Kong still enjoys the degree of press freedom that it did before 2020.
“Nothing has changed” is the official line pushed by government spokesmen in Beijing, echoed by local Grenville Cross in newspaper pieces. For the opposite view we have Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiéres or RSF if you are subject to Quebec Province language laws) who are the compilers and curators of the relevant international league table, the World Press Freedom Index.
The message of the index is stark. Two decades ago Hong Kong was right up there among the respectable countries to which one might wish to emigrate, at number 18. In 2023 it was number 140 out of 180 countries covered. This year it improved to 135. The compilers gloomily noted that this was not because Hong Kong’s score had improved, but because some others we must now consider rivals had deteriorated.
As a result we have now surpassed South Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia and Lebanon. That is the sort of company in which we now find ourselves.
I realise that compiling tables of this kind is not an exact science. Indicators have to be selected, turned into numbers and aggregated. During this process choices have to be made and different choices will produce different results.
On the other hand it is difficult to believe that any subtle adjustment of the methodology would produce much alleviation of a 117 place drop down the table. People are free to wonder about the details: are we really worse than Bolivia? They may argue that things could be worse. China, after all, sits in place 172 this year, rescued from a lower slot by massive deterioration in Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea.
However the complacency crew prefer simply to ignore all this. They also ignore some rather obvious anecdotal milestones. When the News of the World was caught in criminal mischief its owner, Rupert Murdoch, was summoned to a hearing in the House of Commons. He was not paraded through his newsroom in chains.
When the Hong Kong Standard was found to have fraudulently faked its circulation figures the owner was not prosecuted at all. The explanation, vigorously propagated by Mr Cross in his previous role as a government lawyer, was that such a prosecution might have resulted in the owner, Sally Aw Sian, closing the newspaper and putting hundreds of its employees out of work.
The 900 or so journalists and many other workers who have lost their jobs due to the current spate of prosecutions will no doubt wish that this consideration still found favour in the Department of Justice. Mr Cross, like his successors, seems to have discarded it.
I still encounter working journalists from time to time, as well as people who used to be working journalists, and there is a clear consensus in the profession that times have changed. Indeed, a common topic of conversation at journalists’ gatherings these days is who will be next for closure, jail or exile.
Perhaps this is too pessimistic. Mr Cross’s argument, shorn of some wolf warrior points about British hypocrisy, rests on two feet. One is that press freedom is protected by the Bill of Rights, the Basic Law, the National Security Law and its local supplement. The other is that large numbers of media organisations still have “a presence” in Hong Kong.
To take the second point first, this is not an indication of anything except, possibly, that Hong Kong is an easier place for journalists than the mainland, hardly a tribute to our “vigorous media scene.” The figure cited is for December of last year, so it does not include recent departures like those of Radio Free Asia and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Also the inclusion of a “public service broadcaster” in the scene hardly does justice to recent changes at RTHK.
But the legal side is Mr Cross’s speciality and here we are perhaps entitled to be most disappointed.
The Bill of Rights Ordinance was a genuine attempt to entrench notions of human rights in the Hong Kong legal system. It failed. Judges, possibly sensing an attempt to lure them into a political minefield, refused to cooperate. Attempts to rely on the newly codified rights were usually rejected on the grounds that the ordinance merely enumerated the rights that were protected under the existing law. The only substantive effect of the ordinance was the deletion of some “reverse onus” arrangements, under which the defendant was in some circumstances required to prove his innocence instead of the usual arrangement under which the prosecution has to prove guilt.
Judges have been equally unreceptive to suggestions that the provisions about rights in the Basic Law should be interpreted as invalidating any existing law which violates those rights. The national security law is, of course, above local supervision and any attempt to limit its purview would be overruled by Beijing.
It is a characteristic of legislation that it supersedes whatever was there before it, so the local Article 23 legislation is not going to be much help in court either. Hong Kong, in short, has very fine verbal protections for freedom of the press, but they are in practice no help at all. They are like the similar protections in the PRC constitution. The talk is there; the walk is not.
This is regarded as a commonplace item of information outside Hong Kong and the idea that press freedom in the territory has been curtailed neither originated in nor is confined to the British Foreign Office. It is no doubt held with particular enthusiasm by the three freelance journalists who were refused admission last year, as well as the RSF representative who was barred more recently.
It may well be that things could be worse. We do not have prior censorship yet. The number of apps mysteriously absent from the Apple store matches the number in Russia, but not the much higher number in China. I can still write that we do not live on Planet Cross.
It may also be that national security requires sacrifices, and a reduction in the degree of press freedom available is one of them. I wouldn’t dare express an opinion on that. It is not my nation. But cake cannot be simultaneously had and eaten. Maybe the destruction could have been worse. Maybe it was worth it. But we should not be required to pretend it has not happened.
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