25th Anniversary of the Basic Law – CY Leung Attempts to Rewrite History

At the ceremony for the 25th Anniversary of the Basic Law, CY Leung claims that the authors of the Basic Law never intended candidates for the city’s leadership elections to be put forward by the Hong Kong public. Martin Lee Chu-ming, one of the drafting committee members and founding chairman of the Democratic Party, said Leung was “factually wrong”.

Chief Executive, CY Leung, has since retracted part of a statement in which he said that civic nomination was never mentioned during the drafting of the Basic Law.

Mr Leung originally issued a statement on Sunday afternoon again accusing pan-democratic lawmakers of wrongly suggesting that the Basic Law allows for civic nomination for electing chief executives.

Just three hours later, Mr Leung reissued his statement, but this time paragraph two said only that two of five proposals for selecting the chief executive did not mention civic nomination, rather than all five proposals as stated in the earlier version.

On Saturday, veteran democrat Martin Lee, a member of the Basic Law drafting committee, presented documents which he said showed that the idea of civil nomination had in fact been proposed.

Mr Lee said among the five proposals raised during the drafting, proposal three stated that someone could be a chief executive candidate if they were nominated by 50 hong kong permanent residents. He said this showed that the spirit of civic nomination had been suggested.

It’s sad to see the man ‘elected’ to represent Hong Kong doing his best to destroy it, all for his personal gain.

Chief Executive’s Revised Statement on “Civic Nomination”

In response to recent allegation that the concept of “civic nomination” had been raised during the drafting of the Basic Law, the Chief Executive, Mr Leung Chun-ying, issued the following statement:

Yesterday (April 4) when I addressed the “Seminar for the 25th Anniversary of the Promulgation of the Basic Law”, I pointed out that “during the drafting of the Basic Law, the ‘consultation document’ released in 1988 has listed five proposals on methods for selecting the Chief Executive. The two proposals of selecting the Chief Executive by universal suffrage have not mentioned ‘civic nomination’.”

When the Basic Law was endorsed and promulgated on April 4, 1990, Article 45 reads: “The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”

If someone said the concept of “civic nomination” had been raised during the drafting of the Basic Law, this exactly illustrates that “civic nomination” and “nomination by a nominating committee” are totally different concepts. After comprehensive consultation by the Basic Law Drafting Committee, “nomination by a nominating committee” was eventually stated in the Basic Law. Hence for those who recently said that “nomination by a nominating committee” could be interpreted as “civic nomination”, they are just “guessing and taking advantage of the literal meaning of words” and contravening the Basic Law.

Last year, some members of the Legislative Council insisted that “civic nomination” was indispensable in selecting the Chief Executive by universal suffrage. If today these members insist on such saying, they know full well that they are contravening the Basic Law and are just creating problems. The result is they would take away the rights of Hong Kong people to select the Chief Executive by “one person, one vote” in 2017.

Ends/Sunday, April 5, 2015 Issued at HKT 19:38

Read the official release here  (It should be noted that this is the revised version of CY Leung original statement)

Hong Kong’s Basic Law is available in English and Chinese here