The fifth estate

Having spent six years in the UK, I have a lot of feelings for the country. I love its culture, its diversity, the parks, the London accent and many other things. However, one thing does stand out: its freedom of the press. For an average Canadian you may think I am being silly, but I come from a city where reporters can be arrested for asking questions in a media conference. So, freedom of the press is not exactly a God-given right in some parts of the world.

Anyway, the first time I heard about the 30-year rule I was fascinated. Back in my days as a student, it was an annual event. Each year, all public records would be made available for public inspection once they had been in existence for thirty years. Then the rules were changed with effect from 2005. The essence of the change is that any citizen can request a wide range of information even before the 30-year point, though exceptions would apply to certain types of record.

A recent example is the disclosure of a document about the Falklands war, which took place in 1982. For years, most people had the perception that Margaret Thatcher had a very strong opinion about the war and wanted to win at all cost. However, the document released in 2012 shows a different picture.

The spirit here is not what Margaret Thatcher thought, but being a citizen means you have the rights to question what really happens in your government. The 30-year rule, or whatever it is called in other democratic countries, is there to protect sensitive information and to make sure it cannot be destroyed without a very valid reason. But like I said earlier, not every country has the same level of freedom and same level of respect for public information. In 2012, I found out a huge amount of public records were destroyed in Hong Kong – if you stack them up, it would be about 14 times the height of the Manitoba Hydro building in downtown Winnipeg.

There is no legislation in place to protect the public record in Hong Kong, so there is no legal implication when someone destroys any public record. Essentially they can burn every single public record even as I type this blog (the person may be tried for arson, but not for destroying public records).

The fourth estate hardly functions in Hong Kong already, and the citizens – I call them the fifth estate, have no way to find out what actually happens because any public record can be destroyed anytime. I cannot help myself but to draw parallelism between Hong Kong in 2012 and Berlin in the 1930s.

God bless Hong Kong.