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| PANEL Whose Records Are They, Anyway? The Hong Kong Archives Law and the Public’s Right to Information | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Watch live on Facebook from 1pm. How can we make sense of what is happening today if we don’t have the context of yesterday? And that includes having access to official files and records of the past. But unlike most advanced societies, including China, Hong Kong currently suffers from the lack of an Archives Law, stipulating how records should be kept, preserved and made available to the public. As a consequence, and particularly since the Handover, many official records — meeting notes, transcripts — have been lost, or perhaps deliberately destroyed.
To tackle this problem, the Law Reform Commission has come up with a report looking at both the need for an archives law and legislation guaranteeing public access to information. Some journalists, historians and archivists think the proposals are too weak. But there is still time for the public to respond.
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Speaker: Stacy Belcher Lee, HKU University Archivist and Member of the Law Reform Commission Archives Law Sub-committee; Prof. John Bacon-Shone, Director, Social Science Research Centre, HKU; Don Brech, Member of the Archives Action Group and former Director of the HK Government Records Service,
Audio:
The Human Rights Press Awards are run by the FCC, Amnesty International Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Journalists Association. The 24th annual awards will be held on May 6, 2020, in a ceremony at the FCC. See last year’s winners.
