The Society for Protection of the Harbour has ceased operations after 30 years of advocacy to protect Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. The founder and main driving force of the group, Winston Chu Ka-sun, indicated his disappointment at the recent amendments to the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance and said “he was not sure about the future of the harbour”.
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I had the privilege of working with the group as its professional planning adviser through all the Town Planning Board and court processes that took place. What it has achieved needs to be fully appreciated.
In the early 1990s, Chu, then a member of the Town Planning Board, became concerned with the scale of the reclamation proposed by the government. It would effectively reclaim all the harbour except for a 1km-wide channel, and what was a harbour could become “Victoria River”. Imagine the extent of water that would have been removed – for example, all of Kowloon Bay, 1km from North Point up to Kai Tak, would be all land and buildings. Chu’s mother directed him to do something about that, and he certainly did as he was told.
The society was founded in 1995. The next year, its vice-chair, legislator Christine Loh Kung-wai, introduced the private members’ bill that was to become the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance. The law was short but powerful, requiring all public officers to protect the harbour from reclamation. The ordinance, which came into force on June 30, 1997, was one of the final legislative acts of the outgoing British administration.
The government at the time was planning for a major makeover of Central and Wan Chai that involved reclaiming much of the harbour between the Star Ferry pier and North Point, including filling in the Causeway Bay typhoon shelter. When the Town Planning Board accepted these plans, against the submissions of the society, the group challenged its decisions through judicial reviews, the most significant of which was the one filed in February 2003 that reached the top court.
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I did not realise at the time how significant these challenges were. To my knowledge, it was the first time civil society had mounted a legal challenge against the government since the handover. The question on our minds was: how would the legal process stand up under the new “one country, two systems” context?
