Lawmaker-elect Yau Wai-ching. Flickr/Prachatai. Some rights reserved.
On 7 November 2016, China’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC–SC) handed down an unsolicited interpretation of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the legal text which guarantees the territory’s autonomous status and governance. This is only the second time since the 1997 ‘handover’ of the city-state to China, that it has made use of this constitutional prerogative, which has always sat uneasily with the independence of Hong Kong’s judiciary.
