Just days after dozens of journalists were injured by police while covering the city’s chaotic National Day demonstrations, the Hong Kong Journalists Association has filed a legal challenge against the city’s police over improper treatment of media personnel during anti-government protests.
According to a statement published on the HKJA website yesterday, the legal challenge was made against Police Commissioner Stephen Lo in relation to officers allegedly failing to “comply with constitutional and public law duties to facilitate journalistic activities.”
In the statement, HKJA Chairman Chris Yeung said: “We firmly believe that freedom of expression and freedom of the press are the cornerstones of Hong Kong that must be maintained. We look to the court to exercise its supervisory role and seek the declarations from the court so that the HKPF [Hong Kong Police Force] and the Commissioner of Police can be held to account.”
The judicial review was filed by Vidler & Co., the law firm headed up by lawyer Michael Vidler, who is also representing injured Indonesian journalist Veby Mega Indah in a separate case.
Indah was shot in the face with a police projectile while covering a protest on Sunday, prompting her to file both a police complaint and a civil lawsuit over the injury. In a Facebook post, Vidler confirmed that Indah has been left permanently blind in the right eye.
The statement, published on Wednesday, confirms that the projectile was a rubber bullet, and not a bean bag round as previously thought. Indah is still recovering in hospital.
News of the judicial review and Indah’s condition come amid ever-increasing concerns that the city’s police force have been deliberately preventing journalists from doing their job by blocking them from filming arrests, allegedly threatening them, and even appearing to target them with tear gas and rubber bullets.
During Tuesday’s National Day protests, multiple outlets including RTHK English and the SCMP were forced to recall their reporters from the field over fears of violence, HKFP reports. Several outlets reported staffers being hit with rubber bullets, sponge rounds, and tear gas rounds.
In one video from Sunday, a riot cop appears to obliquely threaten an Apple Daily journalist covering a protest in Tuen Mun, telling them to “stay away from me, my gun is very dangerous, it may be accidentally discharged.”
Police officers to an Apple Daily journalist:
There’s a fire up front. Why don’t you film that? Motherfucker! Such a big fucking piece of news & you don’t film it?
Stay away from me. My gun is very dangerous. It may be accidentally discharged.https://t.co/jREpUHhuwx pic.twitter.com/b1fsG1oWUg
— Mary Hui (@maryhui) October 2, 2019
As more wildcat protests cropped up on Wednesday evening, a police officer was caught on camera forcibly ripping off the face mask of a Ming Pao photojournalist in Tai Wai while another officer threatened him with pepper spray.
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