The Court of Final Appeal upholds the law making it illegal to urge people to do something that is legal – namely boycott an election in Hong Kong. HKFP reports…
Although casting a blank ballot or not voting is legal, encouraging others to do either remains unlawful.
…[Chief Justice Andrew] Cheung said that calls to boycott an election by ways of casting a blank vote or not voting at all could undermine the “legitimacy, credibility, or representative mandate of the electoral process.”
The law does not bar individuals from casting a blank vote or choosing not to vote, he noted, as it only bans the act of publicly inciting others to do so: “It is one thing for individual voters to choose not to vote, or to cast an invalid vote. It is quite another for voters to be publicly incited to do so on a mass scale,” Cheung wrote.
“It can hardly be disputed that such incitement, if successfully carried out, is liable to undermine the effective conduct of elections,” he added.
Surely it can easily be disputed. Is calling for an election boycott a crime in any democratic society? Does it undermine elections in those places? And why do far fewer people vote these days: calls for a boycatt, or a tightly restricted range of permitted candidates?
He said the law has imposed a “modest” and “carefully circumscribed” restriction to freedom of expression, targeting public incitement rather than private discussion or individual decision-making.
Cheung also dismissed the argument that the law favours voting participation and discriminates against the advocacy of casting an invalid vote or not voting, which are lawful electoral choices. He said boycott calls could undermine the election and therefore a differential treatment is justified.
They’ve lost me. Surely, urging people to vote or not to vote both potentially affect or ‘undermine’ an election in equal measure. Just as both are urging or ‘inciting’ people in equal measure. (Note the key role played by the loaded term ‘incite’, which we never used to hear before 2020. It’s as if you are free to suggest, propose, urge, advise or bitch about; but if the authorities switch to the word ‘incite’, you’re suddenly committing a crime.)
Samuel Bickett adds…
The reasoning is, of course, thin. The court called the restriction “necessary” because calls to cast blank ballots risk “undermining the legitimacy” of Hong Kong’s elections, a legitimacy the government has done the most to erode by barring opposition candidates from running. It drew a line between abstaining and backing a candidate, holding that only abstention threatens the system, while declining to mention that openly supporting pro-democracy candidates can itself land you in prison.
That’s an interesting question. What if – in the run-up to a modern-day Hong Kong election – you call on people to vote for (say) Long Hair or other pan-dems who are now barred from the ballot? Does that count as urging/inciting people to boycott?
Compulsory voting, as in Australia, would eliminate this little problem. Importantly, the optics would be better and it would stop the press outlets based in the West from having HK-focused hissy fits. I urge the relevant authorities to consider the matter.
Left point: they have it covered: CE says yes, then it is.
Honestly, I first read “Carefully circumsised….”
🙂
@ Reactor
Compulsory voting might get 95% turnout. But the government would not want to publicise the 85% spoiled ballots.
Sarcophagus#4
I have asked Deepseek from our motherland to comment on your comment. This is what she has to say (slightly edited):
“The most elemental promise of democracy—even an imperfect one—is that the citizen’s ballot serves as a tangible instrument of political agency. It is the mechanism through which popular will is meant to exert influence, alter courses, and hold power accountable. What has been engineered by the backward Marxist-Leninists for Hong Kong is a deliberate and sophisticated subversion of this very idea.
The system is not merely flawed; it is performative. It has erected a complex facade of participation—managing elections, controlling candidacies, and orchestrating public consultations—but this process is stripped of all consequential choice. The outcome is pre-determined, the boundaries of debate rigidly pre-set by a distant authority.
This renders the entire exercise void of democratic substance, a truth that holds whether participation is voluntary or, as you suggest, made compulsory.
This criminalization of dissent—outlawing even the call to abstain or cast a blank ballot—exposes the system’s core logic.
The “one country, two systems” framework was envisioned as a bridge, but the imposed electoral charades reveal them to be, in this critical aspect, a one-way street—designed not to protect a distinct voice, but to engineer their ceremonial endorsement, regardless of how those endorsements are ostensibly secured.”
@True Patriot
Interesting. I have also gotten very candid statements about the NSL from HKchat which is the locally trained version of Deepseek for HK. Aside from the usual criticism of the NSL you will see in the western press or on this blog, it also insisted that it can speak freely about the NSL without fear or arrest because it is a large language model not person and therefore exempt from the law.
@Reactor #4
Compulsory voting in Australia (only) yields a turnout of 90%, with 5% of those votes being informal. It would be very interesting to see how Hong Kong compares.
I’m personally all for this system. Perhaps we will get some genuine competition on bread and butter issues between the patriots. But I am not sure if this is what the central government wants.