Firefighters have removed a banner protesting the disqualification of pro-democracy lawmakers and calling on Hongkongers to vote in Sunday’s by-election after it appeared on Beacon Hill last night.
Emergency services were unable to take down the yellow banner in Kowloon when it was first spotted, citing safety issues caused by the rain, but it was finally taken down this morning, hk01 reports.
The banner was placed there by political party the League of Social Democrats (LSD) ahead of the upcoming by-elections to the city’s legislative council.
According to Ming Pao, LSD chairman Avery Ng said the banner was protesting the government’s dismissal of six elected lawmakers and is calling on Hongkongers to show their dissatisfaction at the ballot box.
Sunday’s by-election came about after four pro-democracy lawmakers — Nathan Law, Leung Kwok-hung, Lau Siu-lai, and Edward Yiu — were ousted in July after a court ruling that voided their oaths of office for reasons including speaking too slowly, inserting extra words, and using a tone deemed disrespectful to China.
In November 2016, two pro-indendence lawmakers — Sixtus Baggio Leung and Yau Wai-ching — were also stripped of their seats for oath-taking antics that included unfurling a banner that read “Hong Kong is not China,” mispronouncing the word “China” as “chee-na,” and replacing the word “Republic” in “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China” to “re-fucking.”
Their exclusion followed on from a controversial interpretation of Hong Kong’s Basic Law by China’s parliament in November 2016, which ruled that lawmakers must swear allegiance to Hong Kong as part of China and deliver their oaths “sincerely” and “solemnly” or face disqualification.
Critics cited the ruling as further evidence of Beijing’s erosion of the high degree of autonomy Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy under the “One Country, Two Systems” model.
The events leading up to the by-election have also not been without controversy. In January, democracy activist Agnes Chow — from Joshua Wong’s political party Demosistō — was barred from running because she supports self-determination for the semi-autonomous city, the government said.
This is not the first time the LSD have hung political banners on Beacon Hill. In June 2016, HKFP reported that the party hung a banner with the words “Remembering June 4th, see you at Victoria Park” ahead of the annual candlelight vigil to commemorate those who died in the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989.
Weeks later, they hung a banner that read “we are all Lam Wing-kee.” Lam — a founder and manager of a bookshop in Causeway Bay that sold sensitive or political books that are banned in China — was one of five booksellers who went missing in 2015.
Lam returned to Hong Kong in June 2016 and held a press conference saying he was kidnapped by a Chinese special investigation unit looking into the bookstore’s “illegal operation” in sending “banned” books to the mainland, HKFP reported.
The most famous political banner to be hung on a mountain or hill, however, was in 2014, when a yellow banner bearing the words “I want real universal suffrage,” was unfurled on Lion Rock during the city’s umbrella movement.
