Signing an oath of allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will be mandatory as early as next month for civil servants who were recruited July 1 or later, the civil service chief said.
In an exclusive interview with China Daily on Thursday, Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip Tak-kuen said the plan has been finalized. If the new hires refuse to sign the oath, they will not be employed, he added.
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The government attaches stringent requirements on the conduct and integrity of civil servants, that they must not commit crimes and they must be loyal to the Hong Kong SAR government.
Patrick Nip, Secretary for the Civil Service, HK
The new civil servants will be required to confirm in writing that they uphold the Basic Law and pledge allegiance to the HKSAR.
Certain incumbent civil servants also will be required to sign declarations or take oaths of allegiance. They include directorate officers, discipline officers, legal officers, officials recommended for promotion, and those involved in decision-making processes. The major civil service unions will be consulted before the rules for existing civil servants are finalized.
The new rules will affect about 80,000 new and incumbent civil servants.
Cases of noncompliance and breaches of the rules will be dealt with in accordance with existing laws and the Civil Service Code, with the most severe punishment being dismissal, Nip said, adding that he doesn’t believe the oath requirement will discourage people from joining the civil service.
The new requirement comes after at least 46 civil servants were arrested for their alleged involvement in the often-violent civil unrest that has embroiled the city since June 2019.
One of the most recent cases was a female system programmer at the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, who had been an employee for only about six months when she was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of spreading online hate information, inciting people to join unauthorized gatherings, and threatening numerous times to harm police officers. She was released on bail.
In August, an Immigration Department female member of the clerical staff, an employee for about two years, was accused of releasing personal information of government officials, judges, lawmakers, police officers and their families after hacking the department’s computer system and then publishing the information on Telegram, an online messaging platform. She was arrested, brought to court, and remanded in custody pending her trial scheduled for Oct 19.
Both women are in their 20s.
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Without commenting on individual cases, Nip said new hires on their three-year probation period will be sacked if they are arrested and prosecuted on charges of taking part in illegal public activities. Nip confirmed that the dismissal mechanism has aleady been triggered, with one employee being terminated. He declined to elaborate.
“The government attaches stringent requirements on the conduct and integrity of civil servants, that they must not commit crimes and they must be loyal to the Hong Kong SAR government,” Nip said.
He said the Civil Service Bureau will ask department heads to institute the dismissal procedure and cease employment of implicated employees.
The dismissal procedure will be conducted in line with civil service regulations without the need to wait for the outcome of the court proceedings, he said.
“If a civil servant is arrested but not indicted, the relevant mechanism will still be instituted. If the conduct and integrity of the concerned staff are deemed to not fulfill the civil service requirement after a review, their employment will be terminated.”
Nip adds that the termination mechanism of civil servants who are on probation has been there all along. “The government only reinforces this mechanism in light of a number of civil servants taking part in illegal activities last year,” he said.
Nip also said that accusations that the government is convicting employees without a trial are meritless because court procedures are different from civil service employment regulations. “It is for the court to determine conviction of criminal offenses, while the government has the right to decide whether permanently employ a civil servant based on their conduct and integrity as in ordinary employer-employee relations,” he said.
“We have nearly 180,000 civil servants. A great majority of them are dedicated and responsible people, as can be seen from the fight against COVID-19 over the past six months and their input in the Universal Community Testing Programme.
“But of course I am sad to see some violated the law and took part in illegal activities,” he said.
