When Hong Kong's lawmakers finish a marathon three-day session next week it will signal more than the begining of the summer recess, it will close the doors on a slice of history.
The Legislative Council building, which has played a pivotal role in the democratic process of government through two administrations for the past 26 years, will bid farewell to the shouting and jostling of spirited debate as lawmakers move to the Tamar development in Admiralty. When the building reopens in 2012, it will return to its judicial roots as the home of the Court of Final Appeal.
Former lawmaker and 98-year-old Hong Kong institution Elsie Tu has mixed feelings about the building in Central, which started life in 1912 as the Supreme Court.
'It was horrible,' said Tu, an activist in the British colonial era. 'Prisoners were locked up under the court and it was not a very pleasant feeling to know people were suffering there.'
In the 1950s and 1960s Tu regularly went to the Supreme Court building to help defendants who she considered had been falsely accused by police. 'I didn't like the feeling of the court, because I knew at that time a lot of people were there under false charges,' she said.
But it was worse when she found herself in the very same court as a defendant - in a case concerning the Star Ferry riots of 1966. She attended a Commission of Inquiry hearing, offering to be a witness, but later became the accused after some boys were allegedly beaten by police and forced to write a statement saying she had paid them HK$5,000 to throw stones. 'They gave me a horrible time,' she said. 'The lawyers for the government shouted at me and one called me a fascist.'
She refused to give the names of the two policemen who had revealed the boys' plight and finally the head of the inquiry said she would not be sent to jail or fined, but 'sent to the court of public opinion'.
