"The civil service is ever changing, and reforms over the decades - and indeed over the last three years - have seen major advances in efficiency, productivity, cultural attitudes, client- awareness, commitment to higher standards of service delivery, intolerance of corruption and incompetence and - most important of all - commitment to the values of openness, transparency and accountability. "
The words above were spoken in April 2001 at a lunch given for then Chief Secretary for Administration, Anson Chan, at her final public speech before retiring from the Civil Service after a long and illustrious career.
It seems logical, to me anyway, that the qualities as articulated are right and proper, and that in the early 2000s were probably largely followed, despite the odd bad apple.
Fast forward, and I wonder exactly which part of "commitment to the values of openness, transparency and accountability" today's Civil Service doesn't understand.
This week saw a Dutch diplomat severely criticised (perhaps reviled would be more accurate) in both Hong Kong and Holland for actions relating to the apparent abandonment of a Korean child he and his wife had adopted 7 years earlier as a four month old baby. He was initially unnamed - but that didn't last too long. As reported in today's Sunday Morning Post on the matter of the diplomat, the chairman of Adoption United International said "This guy is in public office...he cannot hide behind the fact that privacy should protect him".
By way of contrast we now have the case of a senior civil servant in Hong Kong who, it seems, has admitted to having had extra marital relations - as a result of which he found himself as a victim in a blackmail case. Blackmail is wrong - no question from me on that but, as they say, it takes two to tango. His identity, however, has been protected by a court order, and there I do have a question. Just one.
Why?
I can, I think, understand why there may be occasions when the identity of a victim might be legitimately witheld but it was interesting to read the judgement of the trial judge who said;
"But Judge Chan did not fully accept Mr X's evidence, questioning the reliability of his claims that he went to the karaoke bar for the sole purpose of singing, and that he thought Hui's job was to help customers pick songs and to fix karaoke equipment. Mr X had said he went to the Mong Kok karaoke club to sing on October 21 because he was not feeling happy with his wife after he had taken her to work that morning.
"Why didn't he go home and sing at home in order to relieve his unhappiness?" asked the judge, recalling that Mr X had also told the court he sometimes sang karaoke at home.
Judge Chan also said Mr X could not have been so ignorant about the nature of Hui's job."
I am not going to cast moral judgements on the rights or wrongs of the affair, nor comment on the personal lives of individuals. There are plenty of others in Hong Kong who can and will do that, whether they live in glass houses or not. But if the unidentified blackmail "victim" was a man in the street, or had been stalked (caught) by members of some of Hong Kong's "racier" magazines, I do wonder whether he would have enjoyed the "protection" of a court order that seems to have been the luck of a member of Hong Kong's incorrupt, competent, open, transparent and accountable Civil Service.
Or is he so senior that he needs to be protected at all costs?
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