Hong Kong’s lack of archives legislation has led to frequent legal debacles, costing taxpayers millions of dollars while demonstrating the deficiency in accountable and transparent public records management. Doug Meigs reports.

A group of archivists, lawyers and historians are crusading for archives legislation in Hong Kong, in order to ensure preservation of public records, which now are held largely under the discretion of individual government departments and statutory bodies.

Chua Fi-Lan, a retired district judge and founding member of the Archives Action Group, said there are ample cases to demonstrate why the SAR urgently needs an archives law.

She cites the recent case of the Internet Learning Support Programme. A furor arose when former chief information officer Jeremy Godfrey, charged that high-level political pressure was brought to bear when it came to choosing the company that was to run the HK$220 million government-financed online learning scheme for underprivileged youth.

“During the Legislative Council inquiry, Godfrey said that Elizabeth Tse Man-yee, the permanent secretary for commerce and economic development, had told him he should set out his thinking in hard copy and hand it to her. There were no e-mails. The LegCo discovered that there was a total lack of documentation.”

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