Rachel Cartland, a former Hong Kong senior civil servant is stepping down as a guest presenter on an Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) radio programme, citing concerns over the new national security law.
Cartland arrived in Hong Kong in 1972, and has held a number of senior government positions as one of the only two female expatriates, ranging from being deputy secretary for Culture to assistant director for Social Welfare.
After retiring from the government, she opened a consultancy company with her husband, advising organisations on public policy-related matters.
In 2014, she published Paper Tigress, a book about her career as a senior civil servant in Hong Kong.
She told RTHK's Backchat programme on Wednesday she was most concerned about the article against subversion, where it was an offence to undermine the Hong Kong government.
China’s new national security law, directed at quelling the pro-democracy protest movement, also takes aim at dissent and calls for tougher regulation of the media.
“Now that seems to me to be something that we could be potentially accused of quite often, so either we’re not going to have robust discussions because we’re going to be worried about that, or else we may be doing something illegal,” she said.
“And then the government came out, and I hoped that they were going to be very reassuring, but instead one of the first things that was done was to advise people not to say a particular slogan, and then the priority task given were to review books in public libraries and to review books in school libraries, which really isn’t that reassuring.”
When Carrie Lam, the city’s CEO, was asked if she would guarantee that journalists in the city would be free to report with the new law in place, she said that if “all reporters in Hong Kong can give me a 100 percent guarantee that they will not commit any offenses under this piece of national legislation, then I can do the same.”
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