bc magazine

Editorial: Court of Appeal Reject Oath Appeal

[gview file=”http://www.bcmagazine.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/CACV000224_2016.pdf”]

Today the Court of Appeal rejected the appeal of Yau Wai Ching, Sixtus Leung Chung Hang, and The President of The Legislative Council over their oath taking disqualification. The reasons are steeped in legalise but essentially amount to the fact that Legco and the HK courts are subservient to the Basic Law and that China can change and amend the Basic Law whenever and however it wants.

And that any amendments are how the law should have been read since it came into being on the 1 July, 1997. Thus if China ‘interprets’ the Basic Law and says that, for example, the HK Bauhinia flag is green, even though we can all see its red. Then the flag is green! And anyone who says otherwise can and will be sent to jail even if they said the flag was red in 1998 years before the new interpretation existed.

Given the judge’s very precise interpretation and reliance on the new wording of Article 104 then strictly speaking since 689 omitted the words Hong Kong from his oath then he should be also be removed from office (and have to hand back all the money given to him as he threw the vast majority of HongKongers under the bus). It won’t happen of course, there’s one rule for the entitled, rich and connected and another for everyone else.

The question is will the Court of Final Appeal (CoFA) stand up for the people of Hong Kong, who it must be pointed out freely chose and elected Yau Wai Ching and Sixtus Leung Chung Hang to represent them, and affirm that the laws of Hong Kong are worth the paper they are written on or do we live in the dictatorship that exists north of the border where ‘the law’ changes according to the daily whim and benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s unlikely as it would mean the CoFA having to make a ruling on the Basic Law and having to decide whether China can amend (and make no mistake this ‘interpretation’ is an amendment) and make the amendment retrospective (as the Court ruled regarding ‘interpretations’ in 1999), whenever they want. Much as I respect the members of the CoFA I doubt they are willing to do that.

As I’ve said before, for those HongKongers who love China so much, you’re free to move there. Just remember that anyone who gets rich in China moves their money out of China as quickly as possible, chooses to educate their children in England, USA or Hong Kong and goes to medical clinics overseas whenever they can. If the China the CCP supporting Chinese have created is so wonderful, why are they so keen to leave?

Hong Kong Gets Plugged

Hong Kong, in IFC and ICC, already has two giant penises masquerading as gateposts to Victoria Harbour. Now we have a butt plug too. I guess it’s appropriate with China already having ball gagged the media and the transcendent one hand-cuffing elected legislators who stand up against the rape of Hong Kong by the CCP.

To salve it’s obviously fragile ego New World is to destroy the feng shui of the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront with a butt plug style building that just screams of insecurity.

You do have to wonder if the government department chief who approved the design is blind. Then again, even a blind man could see that the building is so out of character with the rest of Tsim Sha Tsui that it must destroy the feng shui of the harbour.

In that location New World you could have built something iconic and low-level to complement the harbour and enhance the skyline… But your ceo’s insecurity and fragile ego required the stroking of a tall ugly building to match the other tall dicks in the city.

New World, your new monstrosity is like the child standing alone and ignored by all who screams and screams for attention “Hey look I have a big dick too.” Yeah, maybe you do, but it looks more like a giant anal plug and will become the most reviled building in the city. No only because it destroys the harmony and beauty of our city and harbour, but for the giant shadow of corruption that it will cast over the city. The interests of the rich connected few trumping the benefits and wishes of the majority.

Not that New World give a shit about that… as long as the money rolls in and they can scream “Look at me, my butt plug is as big as your penis!”

Beijing’s Reinterpretation of Article 104

Article 104 of the Hong Kong’s Basic Law states:
When assuming office, the Chief Executive, principal officials, members of the Executive Council and of the Legislative Council, judges of the courts at all levels and other members of the judiciary in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region must, in accordance with law, swear to uphold the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and swear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.

Today Beijing offered it’s unsought interpretation which make s three points:

1: Content of the oath
The passage in Article 104 “swear to uphold the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and swear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China,” is the “statutory content” of the Legco oath.

It is also the “statutory requirement and condition” for people to take public office stated in that article, including lawmakers.

2: Definition of “in accordance with law”
a) Taking the oath is a statutory condition and mandatory procedure for people to assume public office.

If one has not taken a valid oath accepted by law, or if one declines to swear in, he or she cannot assume office, and cannot exercise the duties and enjoy the privileges of public office.

b) The oath-taking must fulfil the statutory requirements in format and content. The person taking the oath should take it sincerely and solemnly and must accurately, completely and solemnly read out phrases such as “uphold the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China” and “bear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China” as stated in the statutory oath.

c) If the oath-taker refuses to take the oath, he or she shall be disqualified from assuming public office. One is deemed to have refused to take the oath – and subsequently have his or her oath invalidated – if he or she deliberately reads out an oath different from the statutory oath or does it in an insincere or frivolous manner.

d) The oath administrator has the duty to confirm the oath taking is carried out legally and that the oath complies with this interpretation and Hong Kong law.

Any oath that does not satisfy the above interpretation should be confirmed as an “invalid” oath. Retaking the oath is forbidden.

3: Consequences of breach

Those who make a “false oath” or engage themselves in acts that violate the oath after taking it will bear legal responsibility.

Since this interpretation adds things not explicitly written into the existing law, can it be applied retroactively to those who took the oath in the past? If Hong Kong’s judicial system, the most fundamental difference between Hong Kong and China, remains truly ‘independent’ then that will be for the lawyers to argue over and ultimately the Court of Final Appeal to decide.

Logic and common sense would say that you can’t be guilty of something that wasn’t a ‘crime’ when you did it. But the law, common sense and logic make strange bed-fellows. The law has lots of ways to circumvent law changes. eg driving at the legal speed of 40 only for the limit to be reduced the next day to 30. You can’t be charged with speeding because your speed was legal at the time, but you could be charged with careless driving…

So will the judiciary fall over to kiss Beijing’s derriere, for those of us who love Hong Kong we have to hope not. While the law is a living evolving thing, precedents and case law establish a framework for how that happens.

If the CCP is allowed to trample over the law, then tragically Hong Kong is a dead man walking. If the law has no meaning, why will multi-nationals and big companies remain here when a contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They will just move to China where contracts are always open to reinterpretation, often by a sack of money under the table or a fist.

Read the Basic Law here

Google Looking to Censor Coverage of Charlie Hebdo Terror Attack

Today, over a year after the article was published google sent bc magazine a warning over bc’s coverage of the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks and our publishing of a series of iconic Charlie Hebdo covers.

In essence the warning was delete/censor the Charlie Hebdo covers article or we (google) will deactivate your adsense account and stop serving adverts to bcmagazine.net.

Here’s a link to the article www.bcmagazine.net/tag/satire/

bc magazine may not agree with every viewpoint expressed in Charlie Hebdo. But free speech and freedom of the press are two of the cornerstones of a modern society so we are 100% behind their right to use satire and humour to expose the absurd and ask questions of hypocrites – without getting shot.

Fuck off google!

[espro-slider id=10092]

HK Sevens

Dear bc readers

As editor, I apologise that our Sevens coverage hasn’t been as comprehensive as in past years. Especially as during the last domestic rugby season bc magazine averaged around three articles per week on local rugby.

The reason is, and I’ll quote the HK Rugby Union’ s PR mandarin Sean Moore “I will continue to omit you from my press release distribution and invitation to rugby union events”. “I believe that my decision is defensible based on the negative spin consistently applied to those efforts”

Negative spin – that means for bc magazine to get press releases and notification of rugby events and media accreditation to matches for our rugby photograher we must write sycophantic “HKRU is wonderful” advertorials.

bc magazine exposed the HKRU’s introduction of ethnic quotas and active racism to local rugby via a new rule announced last September. The rule was quickly amended after bc’s article was published and a defamatory and factually inaccurate cover-up campaign mounted against myself and bc by the HKRU and it’s Chairman Pieter Schats.

It should also be stated here that World Rugby the sports global governing body refused to condemn the HKRU’s introduction of racism to local sport when asked in September to comment on the new rule. So much for rugby’s stated core values of integrity and respect. Perhaps World Rugby could explain how racism ‘builds character’?

The HKRU thinks bc shouldn’t criticise them for scrapping children’s tickets for the general public at this year’s event. Local children who get inspired by watching rugby at the Sevens are the future player pool of the national side, the dream and the desire to represent your country infront of 40,000 screaming fans starts from watching in the stands.

The blatant sexually discriminatory bias of the HKRU’s website where 90% plus of the coverage is about men’s rugby is shameful given the vibrant and surging growth of the game amongst women locally in recent years. As I write this www.hkrugby.com has no mention of day 1 of the HK Women’s Rugby Sevens. The day’s match results are nowhere to be found.

The HKRU’s response to me writing and exposing the truth – throwing it’s toys out of the pram like a spoilt child and blocking my accreditation as a photographer to cover the Sevens and deleting bc magazine from the HKRU’s media mailing list.

Actively introducing racism to local rugby, price gouging children, sexually discriminatory coverage… The HKRU has far deeper and more institutionalised problems than ‘negative spin’.

For the first time in over 20 years I won’t be slaving over a computer screen till 5am finishing articles and editing photos. Hope you enjoy the rugby, I will!

Go Hong Kong!

恭喜發財 Kung Hei Fat Choi

恭喜發財 Kung Hei Fat Choi
Wishing all our readers a happy and prosperous year of the monkey.

Censorship, Intimidation and Harassment of SCMP Reader

It’s ironic that while on it’s front pages the SCMP vociferously advocates for press freedom and the release of Bo Lee and his fellow disappeared. The reality within it’s own pages is that of censorship, intimidation and harassment of any reader who dare criticise or question an SCMP employee. The exact type of actions that the SCMP would have its readers believe it looks to expose in others. The hypocrisy is sad.

On the 1 January the SCMP’s Kevin Kung spent 16 hours, working until 1am, on a story about the New Year’s Day Youth Rugby Tournament at HK Football Club. By his own admission he didn’t stay until the end of the tournament. A sterling effort you might think, except that the published article, a massive 250 or so words, quite simply ignores half the participants. Focusing solely on the boys rugby, reading his original story you’d never know that half the rugby played that day was by girls.

Linda Olson the administrator and driving force behind the Women’s Rugby Hong Kong Facebook group enquired politely of Mr Kung about the gender bias in his article.

“I am wondering why you only reported on boys’ rugby in the article below?
The headline makes it sound as if only boys took part.
The article itself makes no mention of the girls who played.
The video includes only brief coverage of girls rugby (the U12s team and captain).
This is unacceptable.
Nearly a quarter of rugby players in Hong Kong are girls/women and it is the most rapidly expanding demographic here.
Please ensure that your coverage is more inclusive in future..”

The article’s author Mr Kung replied and made some edits to ‘improve’ the online version of the article:
1. “Girls” was added to the sub-headline making it gender neutral.
2. A photo with caption of Gracie Hood (GH) was added.
3. An extra paragraph added to the end of the article mentioned the U19s girls’ game (but did not name the Captain as they had with the boys game) and GH being named Best and Fairest of the match.
Mrs Olson notified the WRHK Facebook group members of the changes and thanked Mr Kung for making them, at the same time providing a quantitative analysis of the gender imbalance of the SCMP coverage.

Mr Kung however had also cc’d in SCMP Sports Editor Noel Prentice who then fired off an intimidatory and threatening email to Mrs Olson which he cc’d to senior figures at the HK Rugby Union AND Mrs Olson’s employer!!!

Mr Prentice’s email is quite astounding in it’s arrogance, tone and less than full disclosure of facts.

“I take exception to you accusing my reporter and SCMP of sexist coverage when Kevin has gone out of his way to cover rugby and the New Year’s Day tournament. He spent 16 hours compiling the online and print coverage so please have some respect.

SCMP is a great supporter of rugby and we give what many consider a niche sport a disproportionate amount of coverage. (bc’s note: why, because the HK Rugby Union pay the SCMP a lot of money to write about local and international rugby). And we have also gone out of our way to cover the emergence of women/girls in the game and the opportunity they have been afforded.

We do not have the resources to give blanket coverage to any sport and all sports and events are judged on their news value.

We also strive to be fair and balanced and I would expect you to also adhere to these principles when delivering any gender bias lectures to the students of Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong.” SCMP’s Noel Prentice

If it takes Mr Kung 16 hours to write a 250 or so word article it does explain a lot about why the SCMP print edition is so thin and lacking in content compared to years past. Joking aside Noel Prentice’s email is factually mis-representative of Mrs Olson’s enquiry and comment; neglects to mention that the HKRU pays the SCMP lots of money to ‘support’ the writing and publishing of stories about rugby; and extremely patronising of the fairer sex “the emergence of women/girls in the game and the opportunity they have been afforded” and by assuming that boys rugby coverage is of value, while coverage of girls youth rugby has no news value.

If the original article was to quote Mr Prentice “Fair and balanced” then Mrs Olson wouldn’t have needed to contact Mr Kung and could have used the story to show how the media was covering girls and women’s rugby in the same detail as men’s rugby. That it didn’t make any mention of 50% of the tournaments participants makes it unbalanced not fully accurate and a perfect example of gender imbalance in the media – the subject of Mrs Olson’s frustration and her class.

Why Mr Prentice also cc’d Mrs Olson employer, in what appears to be a blatant intimidation attempt to damage her professional standing and work relationship with her employer – while at the same time looking to censor the use of SCMP content in an education setting – is something the SCMP failed to answer when bc emailed them asking for a comment.

Read the full email conversation here – email addresses have been removed to protect people’s privacy.
Read about women’s rugby in bc magazine and here on the Women’s Rugby Hong Kong facebook group.

Olympic Sevens Qualifying

The Hong Kong Sevens are the best global sporting social event around, in a world before the Internet and instant global communication the HK Sevens were known across the globe even by non-rugby players like myself. For my first tickets I queued overnight in a freezing Victoria Park and stayed three months in a city I’d planned to visit for a few days. That three months, turned into a lifetime and I’m now proudly a Hongkong and this wonderful city is my home. That first Sevens an ecstatic happy memory, the 21 that have followed, some of the best days of each year even though it’s hard work.

I love the Sevens and appreciate that they’re HK Rugby Football Union’s golden goose the multi-million annual tournament that stuffs the Union’s bank account to over-flowing. The competition that even now in the era of professional rugby, players dream of attending or playing at above almost any other. That ‘other’ was once perhaps singular, the Rugby World Cup, from 2016 the ‘other’ is a duo as the Olympics embraces Rugby 7s for the first time.

It’d be tough to say which is the biggest and best known sporting tournament in the world, the Olympics or the Football World Cup. The Olympics probably just shade it. The roar at the HK Stadium when Hong Kong won the shield in 2010 for their first trophy in a decade was amazing. But Lee Lai Shan wining gold at the Olympics was monumental as was Li Ching and Ko Lai Chak’s silver in 2004. Watching Sarah Lee win a bronze medal live at the London Olympics 2012 had me screaming at the computer monitor and walking around so proud and happy of a HongKonger’s achievement on the biggest of biggest sporting stages.

The Olympics, for all their faults, are when the world focuses on sport almost exclusively for a couple of weeks. Hong Kong’s men’s and women’s rugby 7s teams, both have a chance to be among the twelve countries who qualify to compete at Rio2016. The Olympics only happen every four years so qualifying is a hard and rare opportunity, and the fame of the HKSevens has given Hong Kong home advantage for both tournaments.

Really, you didn’t know – I’m not surprised. Tickets for the November 7-8 Qualification Tournament went on sale last week. Yet there’s no mention of this on the website of the HKRFU. Nothing on it’s facebook page, not even a tweet (account suspended). There’s been no press release about tickets going onsale. No details of how many tickets are available locally to the general public (are the Union worried that having 38,000 tickets for sale will reveal how much they are screwing the public allocation at the 7s – come on the public are not stupid, they know they get screwed every March on tickets). Nothing, nada! A black hole of promotion, advertising and awareness.

It is quite frankly a disgrace, Hong Kong might not win the gold medal at Rio2016 but qualifying would be a fantastic achievement. The roar of packed HK Stadium might be the eighth man that pushes Hong Kong across the qualification try-line against our two toughest regional rivals Japan and China. So why does the HKRFU ignore this wonderful opportunity? Are they incompetent? Jealous that the Olympics will injure their annual golden goose? Or is Olympic rugby, like women’s rugby a part of the game to be suffered by the male dinosaurs who run the local game because they’re not feted and fawned upon, their ego’s stroked, as they are by all those $uper rich corporate$ desperate for access to the holy grail of sevens tickets!

Sort it out! The players and fans deserve better!