When the government announced plans to enact Article 23 of the Basic Law, one name immediately came to the minds of local political observers – that of Lei Kin Yon. The young pro-democracy activist has been involved in a decade-long dispute with Macau authorities that has already led to his being detained about 100 times, according to his own calculations. “Most of the time it is pure police abuse,” he explains. “They arrest me for six hours claiming they have to identify me. In fact, they just [...]
Lei Kin Yon – First of all, I should remind you that Article 23 did not exist in the draft of the Basic Law before the events in Tiananmen Square occurred back in 1989. It was added afterwards, because Beijing was worried with the situation in Hong Kong, a city that then-premier Li Peng called the base for subversion and reactionary activity. As Macau would also become a Special Administrative Region, they decided to extend Article 23 to us. It’s obvious the main goal of the Article was to silence voices of dissent against the communist regime in China. They copy-pasted it from Hong Kong’s Basic Law into Macau’s, which is absurd because legislation should have in mind the very different [...]
