A decades-old group advocating to protect Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour has announced its disbandment following legislative changes that relaxed rules on harbour reclamation.
Members of the Society for the Protection of the Harbour made a unanimous decision to disband the 30-year-old group as it was “no longer able to effectively protect the harbour by law,” its chairperson, Hardy Lok, and vice chairperson, Winston Chu, said on Friday.
According to the group’s statement, it decided to cease operations “at midnight last night,” and it is “proceeding with the deregistration procedure.”
Chu said on Friday that legal protections for the harbour had been repealed, including the legal principle that the harbour should be protected and preserved, and the harbour’s special legal status as a “special public asset and a natural heritage of Hong Kong people,” as stipulated by a 2004 top court ruling.
Before the amendments, legal rules required an “overriding public need” to be established before reclamation projects could go forward.
The government said it considered those rules restrictive when it proposed a bill last year to fast-track small reclamation projects and give the city’s leader more control over large-scale works.
The government, however, has no plan to initiate large-scale reclamation works in the harbour, it said.
‘We have nothing’
The amendment would effectively allow the government to replace the court in having the final say over whether there is “public need” for a harbour reclamation project. That would amount to a contravention of common law principles, the society said.
After the changes were passed into law, Paul Zimmerman, an adviser to the society, said that the group was considering whether it would still continue its work.
“We were protecting the harbour with a very useful weapon – a legal weapon. Without the ordinance, we have nothing… to protect the harbour with. And that is the main reason why we are disbanding,” said Chu, the group’s founder, who is a lawyer by profession.
The society has also resigned from the Harbourfront Commission, a government-appointed board that oversees the city’s harbour developments, Chu said.
After consulting several lawyers over the amendments, the society made more than 20 submissions to the authorities, he said. Only half received replies from the government, he said.
None of them addressed the society’s core concern that the government would be allowed to “be a judge of his own cause,” Chu said, referring to a legal maxim.
He added that the society’s proposal to protect the harbour from reclamation by having it recognised as a “national treasure” of China was not accepted by the authorities.
Asked how the legal changes reflected on the state of the rule of law in Hong Kong, Chu said: “It’s too easy to hide behind the rule of law… but it’s more important to administer the rule of law with a sense of fairness and justice.”
“I’m not without hope for the future of the harbour,” he added. “If [the government] exercises control in a wise and fair manner, there’s no problem.”
Chu also said on Friday that the society’s decision to disband had nothing to do with development chief Bernadette Linn’s earlier warning of “soft resistance” against land development and reclamation policy.
In January, the Development Bureau issued a statement on social media to “seriously refute misleading remarks by the Society for Protection of the Harbour.”
The bureau rejected claims that the amendments had raised concerns that Victoria Harbour could become “Victoria River” and accused the group of using “fictitious images” to support its claims.
