Should the Article 23 be passed and can we trust the government to keep their word?

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Wayne Wong 11E        01/05/2007        English Persuasive

                Writing Coursework

                Article 23

Should the Article 23 be passed and can we trust the government to keep their word?

In most democratic governments there are laws protecting national security while the people still have their freedom.  I’m not against having a National Security Law but against how Article 23 is written, there are a lot of gray areas.

There are 7 parts to this law, Treason, Secession, Subversion, Sedition, Theft of State Secrets, Foreign Political Organizations and Organizations endangering National Security.  All but 3 are fine, sedition, theft of state secrets and organizations endangering national security.  They aren’t specific enough.

Sedition refers to inciting others to commit treason, Subversion or secession, or inciting others to engage in violent public disorder that would seriously endanger the stability of the PRC.  This is what the government has drafted for sedition.  This is all right but they don’t explain what ‘inciting’ is enough.  So if Article 23 is passed and you wrote an article about how the Chief Executive of Hong Kong is doing a really bad job and would be good for Hong Kong if he resigned and maybe people will read it.  They might believe what you write is true and go on a demonstration which might cause some violence.  The police will arrest you for sedition since you incited people to engage in a violent public disorder.  But you didn’t mean to cause this violence, you were just expressing your own opinion.

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So sedition could restrict your freedom of expression.

Theft Of State secrets refers to the information on the relations between the Central Authorities and the HKSAR on information acquired by ‘illegal’ access.  Possession of these would mean a theft of state secrets.  This doesn’t specify what a state secret is.  It could mean that if a newspaper had published an article that there had been a military exercise in China and the government hadn’t want people to know that there was one, the newspaper could be shut down or the journalist arrested.  But the newspaper company didn’t know that ...

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