The UK’s relations with Hong Kong: 30 years after the Joint Declaration – Wednesday 17 December 2014 – ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 17 December 2014, notes taken from that telephon regarding accreditation of journalists in Hong Kong.
Witnesses from Hong Kong: Jitendra Joshi, President, Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, and Francis Moriarty, Chairman, Press Freedom Committee, FCC in Hong Kong, gave evidence.
Q143 Mike Gapes: But do people from other countries who want to go to Hong Kong to work as journalists need official accreditation?
Jitendra Joshi: There is no system of official accreditation in Hong Kong. Some countries and some nationalities require visas to enter Hong Kong. The British, Americans, people from most of the European Union and most countries in Asia do not need a visa to visit Hong Kong. You will need a visa to work here, though, if you study beyond a certain period.
Francis Moriarty: The issue is not a direct visa issue. The question within your question is, what identifies a person to be a journalist? In Hong Kong, we have no central accreditation of journalists, which sets us apart in another way from China, where if you want to work as a journalist, whether you are domestic or foreign, you are going to have to register with the All-China Federation of Journalists, which is, of course, a Government, Party organisation. In Hong Kong, we don’t have that, and we have not wanted it.
The issue for us so far is not coming in here, although there have been cases of people who have been banned—for example, the artist who did the statue that is brought out every year for the 4 June memorial. He is Dutch, and he has not been allowed into Hong Kong for a few years. But it is not so much about coming in: it’s about how, once you get here and you want to work, you show yourself as a journalist, especially if you are a freelancer. If you come from The Guardian, Deutsche Welle or whatever, you are going to have a letter from your employer that says, “Here you are, this is what you do.” You’ll get accreditation. If you are a freelancer—today, with the internet and the whole changing media scene, that is a real, live issue—it gets more difficult. In a way, while we have been focusing on traditional media organisations—that is to say, those that have radio stations or TV stations or that print on paper—the future now is people who do websites and collect news on websites. How are they journalists? What is a citizen journalist?
When the police began asking people during Occupy Central to show their press ID, they were determining for themselves what they would accept as press ID and what they wouldn’t. You can work your way back from this to see what our basic concern is: who accredits journalists? In the past, we have never had to worry about that—you said you were a journalist, you had a business card that said so, you went and did your work, and people dealt with you. But now we can see the forces of order laying groundwork. For example, when they cracked down on the final day of Occupy Central, they gave us a warning and said, “If you don’t leave at this point through the approved route, after this you will only be able to go out of one exit and you will have to show your ID for recording purposes”—whatever that means. So, if you went out and you had press ID that they accepted as press ID, you just passed through; if you didn’t, I guess you were suspected to have been one of the participants. They would have recorded your name and your ID card information.
This put freelancers in a very difficult situation, because many news organisations will use a freelancer’s work—even extensively—but not provide them with a letter that says, “Here’s the situation: this person works for us. Please afford them the usual courtesies of the press.” They will not give them that, because they are concerned, for example, about liability. So you have journalists who are now caught in a very difficult situation. One can foresee that the Government might say at some point, “Gee, wouldn’t it be convenient if we had some organisation that provides people with accreditation and we could all agree that that was the accreditation? Wouldn’t that be an improvement?” We can see it coming.
