First there were two, but soon there may be none.

It was announced last Friday that the Hong Kong Government will launch judicial reviews against Nathan Law, ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok Hung, Lau Siu-Lai and Edward Yiu Chung-Yim, in an attempt to oust the four officially elected legislators from office.

The agenda is clear. Our Chief Executive, CY Leung, has deliberately waited for Hong Kong’s courts to acknowledge the NPCSC’s damning interpretation of Article 104 of the Basic Law as binding on Hong Kong’s legal system, before targeting this new batch of pro-democracy lawmakers. Despite all four having been officially sworn into the Legislative Council (LegCo), Hong Kong’s legislative body, the law is no longer on their side, as the recent disqualification of two pro-independence activists, Yau Wai-Ching and Sixtus ‘Baggio’ Leung, has shown. Precedent has now given CY Leung the perfect excuse to carry out a witch hunt unprecedented in the history of Hong Kong politics.

The result of the oath-taking controversy has shown that there are no legal limits to the NPCSC’s interpretive powers. The Interpretation itself has set a clear yet catastrophic precedent, in which it has smuggled in fundamental changes to the Basic Law under the guise of ‘interpretation’. It effectively amends Article 104 to require oath-takers to read out their oaths “solemnly” and “sincerely” in order to be validly taken, or otherwise risk the “legal consequences” of disqualification. The vagueness of the solemnity and sincerity requirements is already very troubling. But since two candidates have already been disqualified on these grounds, there is little room for doubt that the fates of these next four lawmakers have been all but sealed. While I hope to be proven wrong here, it seems only a matter of time before their oaths are retrospectively rendered invalid too.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t an “illogical fear”, as one classmate has put it in an earlier article in The Hong Kong Series. It is a reality that our democratic institutions are being systematically undermined, seat by seat. Regardless of their final outcome, the pending judicial reviews must be recognised for what they are: a political purge. In turn, what we are witnessing is a violent assault by those in power on the franchise of tens of thousands of Hong Kong citizens. If the Basic Law, the instrument designed to be the bedrock of our fundamental freedoms, has instead only revealed to us the fragility of our constitutional order, people have every right to be fearful, and justifiably so.

Putting this fear into an electoral perspective, the pan-democrats currently maintain their veto power by the thinnest of margins: +1 seat (taking into account the two seats now left vacant by Yau Wai-Ching and Sixtus Leung). However, if this crackdown succeeds and four more seats are lost, the Chief Executive will have created the political vacuum necessary for the legislative body to have a veto-proof, pro-establishment and pro-China majority that will happily rubber-stamp any government proposal. Left to its own devices, such proposals could include reviving repressive and anti-democratic Article 23 legislation (as CY Leung has already previously suggested), or even fundamentally altering LegCo’s house rules to preclude an opposition camp from being able to wield veto or filibustering power over the executive in the future.

Before retiring from the Court of Final Appeal in 2012, Justice Kemal Bokhary warned us that a “storm of unprecedented ferocity” is fast approaching Hong Kong. This storm has now long arrived and threatens to sweep away all prospects of genuine democracy. While this does not change the fact that negotiations for true universal suffrage are still undoubtedly constrained by geopolitical realities, so long as the defined paradigm for such negotiations is ‘one country, two systems’, it is surely fair to require that all parties play by the established rules. We may not like that advocates for independence or self-determination pose uncomfortable questions to these rules, but it is inexcusable for Beijing and the Chief Executive to retaliate by unilaterally undermining them as a means to maintain effective political control. On the precipice of a slippery slope, we must stand up on behalf of the soon-to-be-exiled lawmakers; because once we accept compromises to their democratic rights, “we should not be surprised when the same tools of oppression are turned around against us”.*

*I borrow this quote from my previous pupil master, the essence of which struck a very deep chord.