Pro-Beijing figure and lawyer Alan Hoo Hon-ching has suggested that the Department of Justice should announce immediately that the Hong Kong National Party (HKNP) is an illegal organisation. The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) delegate also urged the government to criminalise secession and advocating independence.
Hoo was speaking at a press conference on Thursday where he said that “the HKNP does not only violate the constitution and criminal law, at the same time the party also says that it wants to secede from the country and wants Hong Kong to become a republic.
“It wants to topple the Chinese People’s Government’s sovereignty in Hong Kong. These are all behaviours of incitement according to the law and is a crime endangering the country’s security,” he said.
Hoo also said the government and the Department of Justice are abdicating their responsibilities by not defining the legal consequences of discussing Hong Kong independence in schools.
“It’s no good to just to tell or threaten the teachers with various sections of the education ordinance by saying, ‘you’re on your own,’” he said. “If you’re incapable of defining it, then I think you’re incompetent.”
He said that he would encourage the Central government to make promoting Hong Kong independence a crime in China, so that anyone who is suspected of doing so would face repercussions when they traveled to the mainland.
‘Cannot be stopped’
The HKNP said in response to Hoo that “Hong Kong independence is not something that an individual can stop, and moreover not something that a country can reverse.”
“The party invites the Hong Kong Communist Colonial government to gazette and list the Hong Kong National Party as an illegal organisation and to arrest all members, so destroying the façade of the so-called ‘one country, two systems,’” it said in a statement published Thursday.
University of Hong Kong principal lecturer Eric Cheung Tat-ming told Apple Daily that Hoo’s suggestion that Hong Kong people could be arrested in China for their independence views may violate the concept of one country, two systems. “What you do in Hong Kong, should only be subject to Hong Kong law, unless its put into Appendix 3 of the Basic Law,” he said.
