Growing concern that Green Paper will lead to “fake democracy”
Hong Kong (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Pro-democracy lawmakers warned Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen yesterday "not to play with fire" and change the results of the Green Paper consultation on political reform. This process should determine how the Territory’s chief executive and Legislative Council (LegCo) are elected. For this reason pro-democracy activists handed out a "recommended answers" pamphlet explaining the Green Paper’s traps, urging residents to sign their names and give identification card numbers in support of their recommended model.
Residents have three months to express their preferences but critics point out that the nature of the exercise can be judged from the fact that though the government insists that the community needs to come to a consensus on the way forward, the Green Paper offers the public almost 500 possible answers to the issues put before it.
In their pamphlet pro-democracy activists warn against five traps in the document which they believe have been set either to divert attention from the important issues, or to invite responses that can be easily manipulated, something that a Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau spokesman denied
With their campaign under way, the activists are turning their attention to how they believe the government will evaluate the submissions, wary that no matter how many signatures are obtained, it could choose to place more value on individually written submissions.
Political commentators noted that when the colonial government conducted a consultation for a directly elected legislature in 1987, signature petitions for reform were played down and individual submissions were given extra weight.
Emily Lau Wai-hing of The Frontier told the South China Morning Post that she wanted “to know not just how the government will value and count the submissions, but how it will allegedly `summarise' the submissions and report to the central authorities" in Beijing.
For her part Audrey Eu Yuet-mee of the Civic Party said it was unclear how the government would value submissions on options not specified in the Green Paper.
For pro-democracy activists, there should be "no preset limit" on the number of candidates for chief executive, even though the government only envisages a nomination committee to screen candidates and establish a limited number from which the electorate would choose.
Former Chief Secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang said yesterday she was very disappointed with the Green Paper. Its ways to achieve universal suffrage seemed to be “a recipe for confusion and procrastination.”
Mr Tsang promised the people of hong Kong “that he was going to listen very carefully to their views and he was going to reflect them faithfully to the central government,” Ms Chan said. “We are all waiting keenly for exactly how he is going to produce after the public consultation.”
"Now we have fake democracy," said Martin Lee Chu-ming, founding chairman of the Democratic Party. "We should not call it a Green Paper. It is a red paper, because everything is decided by Beijing."
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