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Britain in Hong Kong May-June 2022 (Chairman's Message)
Dear Members
As we reach the end of April it feels like the pandemic’s 5th wave is at last in the rear-view mirror. The sumptuary social restrictions and border regulations imposed at the start of the year are slowly coming off and, as a result, Hong Kong is coming back.
The case statistics are also looking better. When I wrote the last Magazine Message at the end of February, we were clocking 70,000 new cases and 280 deaths a day. Today we are clocking a seven day average of 420 new cases and 10 deaths.
Every death is a tragedy and we should mourn the untimely passing of all our fellow citizens. On the other hand the 5th wave proved a great deal more manageable and a great deal less calamitous than the pundits were predicting even a few weeks ago.
The vaccination statistics have also been a beneficiary of the 5th wave. At the end of January the seven day average of first doses administered was around 8,000. This number rose rapidly to around 36,000 in mid-February. Today 91% of the population have had at least one dose - although there is a way to go for the 3-11 year-olds (70%) and the over 80’s (64%).
In early January the Government’s response to stem the spread of the virus kicked in with alarming bursts of energy. This resulted in a series of announcements to restrict borders and people, a rollout of testing programmes and an undertaking to build isolation facilities, the scale of which would have been the envy of the ancient Egyptians.
At the Chamber we lobbied against what we saw as the excesses of these measures. We consulted widely by holding a virtual Town Hall with members and gathering feedback through the sub-committees particularly impacted (for example, our excellent Education Committee). We set up a COVID sub-committee at GenCom to consolidate and prioritise the membership concerns.
The end result was a letter that we sent to the Chief Executive on 9th March [link here] and made available to members very quickly thereafter. We also spoke to senior SAR officials and to representatives from the mainland Ministry of Foreign Affairs to express our concerns directly. It was clear that they were in listening mode and concerned to understand what was really happening at the coal face.
In my time as Chairman I have never received quite so many texts, emails, messages and calls from members and business leaders as I did in response to our letter, to thank us for our outspokenness.
I am not able to judge the impact of our letter. I am able to judge the subsequent actions taken by the Government which included:
• Putting the Comprehensive Universal Testing proposal on hold;
• Permitting home isolation for mild or asymptomatic cases;
• Reducing quarantine for arrivals from 14 to 7 days;
• Lifting the flight bans and adjusting the flight suspension mechanisms;
• Allowing international schools to keep teaching on-line and moving to in-person tuition after the Easter holidays;
• Clarifying that parents and children would only be separated where cases had to be treated in ICU’s;
• Relaunching the Employment Support Scheme (“ESS”) for SME’s.
All these were measures that the Chamber had called for in our letter.
But we are not quite home and dry yet. The flight suspension mechanisms continue to plague travel plans and we will continue to lobby for home quarantining and ultimately no quarantine at all.
I recognise that Hong Kong has to manage two sets of border crossing conditions – those with the mainland and those with the rest of the world. This has been the SAR’s great advantage over the last 25 years. During the pandemic, however, this has been a disadvantage and it has proven almost impossible to align the requirements of both borders into a single set of regulations.
We keep looking forward to the day when the entire pandemic is an imperceptible dot in the rear-view mirror. I suspect we will never be entirely rid of this virus but our ability to live with it must increase at the same pace as the restrictive measures used to fight it must surely decrease.
The basis of Hong Kong’s commercial and civic success is its Common Law system. Common Law has been used in the territory since its cession as a Crown Colony in 1842. In those days all the judges in Hong Kong were sent out from the United Kingdom. The writer, PG Woodhouse, spent the first two years of his life in Hong Kong after his father was sent as a magistrate, (serving later as a member of the Executive Council). The Old Supreme Court Building on the Eastern side of Statue Square in Central is, to this day, topped by a statue of the blind-folded “Lady Justice”. It is now home to the Court of Final Appeal which relocated from the Former French Mission Building on Battery Path in 2015.
The Court of Final Appeal (“CFA”) was a created as Hong Kong’s final Appellate Court when the Special Administrative Region was formally established on 1st July 1997. It has exercised judicial authority in the SAR “independently and free from any interference” ever since. The CFA was a clever solution to the question of how final adjudication of Hong Kong laws should operate after the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, before when authority was vested in the Judicial Committee of the UK’s Privy Council.
A key component of the CFA has been the participation of the so-called Non-Permanent Judges (“NPJ’s”) drawn from Common Law jurisdictions, including England & Wales, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There has been almost complete unanimity across the community that the presence of the NPJ’s has worked to preserve a key component of One Country Two Systems - an independent judicial process based on facts and evidence.
On 31st March the two Serving Judges on the UK Supreme Court tendered their resignation as NPJ’s from the Hong Kong CFA. You can see their press release here. At BritCham we had been aware of this risk ever since Dominic Raab, as Foreign Secretary, had raised this prospect in a Six Monthly Report from 2021. We had lobbied against this outcome particularly during our “Door Knock” visits to London, and we expressed our disappointment with the decision in a press release immediately after the resignations which you can see again here.
Whilst we were disappointed with this decision it is reassuring that the so-called “retired” judges serving as NPJ’s, including those from Canada and Australia, have confirmed their intention to continue on the CFA.
The links between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom run deep. They run through the judiciary and the legal profession; the regulatory systems; the accounting, banking, insurance and engineering professions; all the way down to traffic management and road signs and which side of the road we drive on.
I see these links as a great strength and an opportunity for British business, particularly as the mainland opens up further, the opportunities of the GBA are more clearly defined and through Hong Kong business has a unique access point to the largest and fastest growing economy in the world. We should preserve those historic links and nurture them to our mutual advantages.
The theme of this month’s magazine is the forthcoming 25th anniversary of the SAR’s establishment. Hong Kong has been a part of my life for all of those 25 years and I think we should be celebrating this birthday with a sense of hope and optimism. And, after the partial closure of Hong Kong in the past four months we also need to start having fun.
Taking PG Woodhouse as my inspiration again: “Everything in life that’s any fun is either immoral, illegal or fattening”. At BritCham we will, of course, be focusing on the fattening.
