Neglecting nominating committee will contravene Basic Law, says Lam

Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet- ngor said on Thursday that any proposed election procedures which sideline the nominating committee provided in the Basic Law would breach Hong Kong’s constitutional requirements.

A day after the government launched a public consultation to formulate procedures for the 2017 Chief Executive (CE) election, Lam and two other senior officials of the high-level task force discussed the consultation on different radio programs.

Lam repeated that there was ample room for people to voice their views. But she also told the RTHK program the electoral setup was bound by Basic Law provisions and decisions made by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee.

Article 45 of the Basic Law, for instance, stipulates once universal suffrage is implemented, candidates must secure nominations through a “broadly representative” nominating committee “in accordance with democratic procedures”.

Lam said the committee was stated in the law to play a pivotal role in the CE election. “If someone says we can ignore the committee and rethink about a way to nominate a CE candidate, I am afraid that would not meet the Basic Law.”

Lam said because it was such an important deliberation on the city’s political system, people should go beyond vague sloganeering and respect the law. Otherwise, it would be difficult to reach a consensus if discussions went outside the legal framework.

She noted that some slogans sounded as if someone owed people the right to select the city’s leader. Respect for the Basic Law was particularly significant because it was the first document to promise such rights for Hong Kong people.

“As we treasure the Basic Law articles (that guard) all sort of freedoms, we should not … ignore a particular provision when you dislike it, as such creating a different method outside the Basic Law,” she said.

Advocates of “civil nomination” claimed their plan had a 60 percent backing from the public. But Lam, without identifying which survey they were citing, questioned whether respondents of the poll were fully informed. “Do they really understand what that proposal was talking about?”

Aside from the legality of the “civil nomination” proposal, Lam said she also doubted the feasibility of some of its different versions. “Some suggested that a candidate must secure a petition signed by hundreds of registered electors. Is such an idea, in view of the tight election schedule, really practicable?”

The government was reluctant to ditch a flawed plan from the beginning since “every proposal takes extended scrutiny to determine if accommodating changes can be made.” But she said grossly unconstitutional plans would be ignored when appropriate to ensure a focused discussion.

Many Beijing officials were quoted in the consultation paper, such as Qiao Xiaoyang, ex-director of the Basic Law Committee under the National People’s Congress Standing Committee. Lam said these were not “random people” and their views mattered.

Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung said these views were included only for people to consider. Therefore, it was “not most important” to consider whether such weighty interpretations of the Basic Law were legally binding.

Qiao said at a 2007 seminar that the nominating committee should be formed “with reference to” the election committee that chose the city’s previous Chief Executives. Yuen, speaking on a Commercial Radio program, said his understanding was that the two committees did not have to be identical.