Rear Window | Lei Kong on trial for defamation

Severo Portela

First of all we have to plead for your leniency on the untasteful title a la social realism, and for the very word leniency that usually sends shivers whenever keyboarding anything related to freedom of speech on its heights of the Press.  And it is about this thing, freedom of speech, that the MSAR Court of First Instance is called to rule on the defamation of Polytec Group, the developer of the notorious Pearl Horizon housing project, put up against “Son Pou” columnist Lei Kong as well as the weekly director Chao Chong Peng.

To summarize a well-known situation, the Polytec lawsuit is grounded on a suspicion of fraud involving PH for not complying with the contract to hand the houses to the buyers, which Lei Kong mentioned in his commentary column. According to Chao, the plaintiff is asking for an apology and a crippling payment of MOP2 million. The court will decide the coming October 3rd.

However the libel itself exerted an enormous pressure on 30 year-long contributor Lei Kong… he is not writing his high-profile stuff since he received the court notification. Call it self-censorship if you like but the newspaper director Chao has been bold enough to address the lawsuit as “bad faith” against Lei Kong, whose commentary was clearly objective and more also based on the perspective of an economist…“an attempt to suppress freedom of speech”. Lei Kong is adamant to confess to MDT: I do not dare to write, and I can´t write either” – and pardon us the unintended fun, cause there is no fun about a “serious incident, and it harms the freedom of press”.

Given the zeitgeist in the Macau Special Administrative Region we would like to call the coming October 3rd a VIT, or a very important trial pitting big money against small paper. The VIT happens in a grey political environment that has been contaminating the solid basis that constitutes the ground to build the Special Administrative Region.

It looks like that – for reasons we will not and cannot fully expound here – the Basic Law has to be untouched as the constitutional document of Macau; but we could mention its preamble that addresses the historic reality of Macau that bred up to a point the policy of “one country, two systems”.

It looks like too that, given the static frame of the Basic Law, the ongoing drive in the MSAR is to stretch the system we call the second without challenging the Basic Law. A good example, since we are today about freedom of the press, is a letter a local journalists’ association sent to Secretary Wong Sio Chak expressing concerns over the consequences on freedom of the press if changes to be introduced in the Civil Protection Law (CPL) are to be enforced.

Allegedly the proposal of CPL has an exception rational but it opens to replace information, or take information as toxic, for information of biased nature, aka propaganda.

What makes us wonder about the above mentioned drive to stretch the second system is the ultimate trick of dressing those who denounce the assault on any given aspects of the second system as enemies of change and progress, enemies of evolution and development, in other words reactionaries soon to gain the status of opponents.