Social worker who protested Hong Kong gov’t overhaul of licensing body says name removed from committee
Hong Kong Free Press
A social worker who protested the government’s plans to overhaul an industry licensing board has said he believed he had been removed from a committee under the body.
Veteran of the industry Eddie Tse told HKFP on Monday that his name was absent from the Social Workers Registration Board’s Disciplinary Committee Panel’s updated name list, which was publicised by the government last Saturday.
Tse said he had been a member of the panel, which handles complaints against social workers, since 2020. He added that he had not been notified by the board before his apparent removal.
Last week, local media outlets reported that Jackie Chen, a social worker who is awaiting a second trial over a rioting charge linked to 2019, was removed from the list. Chen pleaded not guilty and was acquitted in 2020, but is now facing a retrial in December after the government appealed.
In July, Hong Kong’s opposition-free legislature passed a bill giving government appointees a majority on the Social Workers Registration Board, which is in charge of vetting the qualifications of the city’s social workers. The authorities said the move was needed to “better protect national security.”
Before the bill was passed, Tse staged a two-person petition outside the government headquarters calling the changes “political interference.” He and other social work veterans then conducted a survey, which found that social workers overwhelmingly believed the overhaul would undermine the autonomy of their profession.
Tse told HKFP he did not think his actions should warrant what he believed was his removal from the committee. “If that is really the case, then this seems like retaliation,” he said in Cantonese.
The new list also stated that committee membership was valid “until notified otherwise,” a departure from previous practices. Ahead of the overhaul, the panel was updated every three years.
HKFP has contacted the Social Workers Registration Board for comment.
The government’s overhaul of the Social Workers Registration Board shook up the composition of the body, increasing the percentage of government-appointed members of the board from 40 per cent to over 60 per cent. In recent years, all members elected by their peers had come from the city’s pro-democracy camp.
The amended bill also bars those convicted of national security offences and “other serious crimes” from being social workers.
Before the bill passed in the Legislative Council, seven out of the eight elected board members quit. The new board was unveiled in July, two days after the bill passed. No election was held to replace the members who resigned, meaning the board now consists almost entirely of government appointees.
‘Image problems’
Herman Hui, a solicitor who was appointed the chairperson of the new board, said in an interview on iCable on Saturday that the body had removed three to five people from the disciplinary panel due to “image problems.”
“Those with image problems – no matter what [our] doubts are about them – were not added to the list,” he said in Cantonese.
When the interviewer brought up Chen as one of the social workers removed from the panel, Hui said even though she had not been convicted of rioting, those involved in a disciplinary hearing may not think it is fair for somebody undergoing legal proceedings to be handling their case.
“To prevent these situations from happening, [we thought] why not just exclude people whose image may make others feel they are not too clean,” he said.
Hui add that since the board began their term two months ago, it had deregistered two or three social workers. Their cases may not be related to national security offences, he said.
He denied that there were instances of social workers who had been involved in cases linked to the 2019 protest and unrest, but who had not been prosecuted, seeing their licences scrapped.
Separately, the board was also considering axing the licences of around 10 social workers, Hui said. They included people involved in rioting and unlawful assembles.
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