Accountability and Open Government Cheung, Chor-yung Essays

Accountability and Open Government Cheung, Chor-yung Essays Accountability and Open Government Cheung, Chor-yung Essay Accountability and Open Government Cheung, Chor-yung Essay In a civilized society, the use of political power is a profound responsibility. Holders of public offices can only exercise their authority legitimately if they do so in accordance with principles, rules, and procedures agreed by or acceptable to the society at large, and it is incumbent upon the public officials to justify their decisions with good reasons if challenged. Failure to do so will likely render their exercise of political power unacceptable. Legitimate power, in other words, must be subject to public scrutiny. Power holders who fail the test of public scrutiny will be held responsible, and they will have to step down from their offices if those failures are regarded as sufficiently serious. In the parlance of modern political studies, we call such a system an accountability system. Since accountability in this context comprises both the meaning of giving an account to explain and justify a government decision and of being responsible for its consequences, accountability also implies open government to facilitate public scrutiny of acts of government. Accountability and the Basic Law Accountability is a central but complicated concept in the Basic Law, the mini-constitution of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). A careful reading of the chapter on the political structure of the Basic Law shows that at least four different kinds of accountability can be identified in this constitutional document; they are legal, administrative, deliberative, and political accountability respectively. a) Legal Accountability Paragraph two of Article 43 of the Basic Law stipulates that the Chief Executive of the HKSAR is accountable to the Central Peoples Government (CPG) and the HKSAR in accordance with the provisions of the Basic Law. More specifically, Article 64 provides that the HKSAR government (HKSARG) must abide by the law and be accountable to the HKSAR Legislative Council (Legco) and shall implement laws passed by the Legco and already in force. In other words, the Chief Executive must abide by the Basic Law to discharge his duties to implement the CPGs one country, two systems policy over the HKSAR and to act for the best interest of it. The Chief Executive (as the head of the HKSARG) and the executive authorities also have the legal obligation to observe the laws and to implement them as and when required in accordance with the due process. Failure to do so will make the Chief Executive and his officials legally accountable, and Article 73(9) also empowers the Legco to initiate impeachment pro ceedings against the Chief Executive if no less than one-fourth of all Legco members charge him with serious breach of law or dereliction of duties. b) Administrative Accountability As the Chief Executive is appointed by (Article 45) and accountable to the CPG, he is administratively a subordinate of the Premier of the State Council, who represents the CPG to make the appointment. The Chief Executive therefore should be held accountable to the Premier for the good administration of the HKSAR. Articles 57 and 58 of the Basic Law also prescribe that the Commission Against Corruption and the Commission of Audit, the heads of which are both principal officials nominated by the Chief Executive, shall work independently and be solely accountable to the Chief Executive in discharging their administrative duties to fight corruption and to audit public expenditure within the HKSAR respectively. Article 99 of the Basic Law provides that all civil servants shall be responsible to the government, which effectively means that they are all, via their respective line managers, accountable to the Chief Executive for the good administration and implementation of government policy. Since the introduction of the Principal Officials Accountability System (POAS) in July 2002, all principal officials with policy portfolios are all made directly accountable to the Chief Executive for the outcome of their respective policy portfolio (more on this in the next section). However, for principal officials from the disciplinary forces other than the Commissioner of the Commission Against Corruption (i.e. Commissioner of Police, Director of Immigration, and Commissioner of Customs and Excise) who are not responsible for policy making, administratively they are directly accountable to the Secretary for Security (herself also a principal official) as their departments fall within the ambit of the latters policy portfolio. c) Deliberative Accountability Article 64 of the Basic Law specifically prescribes that the HKSARs executive authorities shall be accountable to the Legco, in which two of the requirements (i.e., presenting regular policy addresses and answering Legco questions) are clearly related to providing information to and explaining and justifying government decisions in the legislature. I think it is reasonable to call this kind of requirements deliberative accountability, as they are meant to make the government accountable in providing regular information to the Legco to promote public debate and scrutiny of government action. d) Political Accountability It can be argued that the Basic Law also prescribes some form of political accountability between the executive and the legislature, in which the Chief Executive is required to resign in the event that his major policy fails to inspire confidence and support. However, the arrangements in the Basic Law in this respect are both unique and complicated. Similar to the parliamentary system in western democracies, Article 64 of the Basic Law stipulates that the HKSARG is accountable to the legislature for matters relating to taxation and public expenditure. It also requires that if the executive ultimately (cf Article 52) losses the confidence of the legislature in these matters or matters relating to major government legislation, the Chief Executive has to resign. However, Legcos initial refusal to approve a budget or a major government bill will not lead to the dismissal of the government of the day; instead, in Hong Kongs so-called executive-led system, the Chief Executive is given the advantage at this stage to dissolve the Legco (Article 50). Only when the new Legco again shows its lack of confidence in the government at a subsequent stage by refusing to pass the same bill that the Chief Executive is held politically accountable and is required to resign.1 It is also important to note that, unlike the common practice in a parliam entary democracy, the passage of a vote of no confidence against the executive in the Legco will not automatically lead to the fall of the government or any ministerial dismissal. While the arrangements in the Basic Law in this regard are rather uncommon, it is still reasonable to think that when it comes to political accountability, the executive is responsible for getting the support of the legislature in matters relating to taxation, public spending, and important government legislation, though it requires two consecutive legislatures no confidence in these matters to trigger the removal of a Chief Executive, which gives considerable leverage to the executive in manipulating the first legislature to succumb to its wishes. The Principal Officials Accountability System and Its Problems In July 2002, the second Tung Chee-hwa administration of the HKSAR introduced the POAS to the government, in which all policy making principal officials, comprising the Chief Secretary for Administration, the Financial Secretary, the Secretary for Justice, and 11 other policy secretaries, are no longer manned by civil servants. Instead, they have all become political appointees with direct policy responsibility to the Chief Executive. The Chief Executive admits that since 1997, government policy and operation have been subject to increasing critical scrutiny by the public, the media, and the Legco. The government acknowledges that in a sense, the introduction of the POAS was a response to calls for resignations of senior officials to take responsibility for serious policy failures since the changeover of sovereignty. For example, in March 1999, after having heavily lobbied the pro-government legislators, the government managed to just overcome a no confidence motion in the Legco against the Secretary for Justice for her alleged failure to defend the rule of law by disallowing the prosecution to proceed against a newspaper proprietor Sally Aw who was well connected to the Chief Executive on corruption charges. In June 2000, a motion of no confidence against the Chairperson of the Housing Authority and the Director of Housing was carried in Legco, for legislators had lost confidence in the two officials in their ability to reform the public housing sector and found them politically responsible for the short-piling scandal, in which corrupt officials allowed substandard piles to be built in government housing estates. Although the non-civil servant Chairperson, Ms Rosanna Wong, resigned voluntarily just before the passage of the vote, the Director of Housing, being a civil servant with security of t enure for his job, did not step down to take policy responsibility. In essence, properly understood, the POAS is a form of individual ministerial responsibility in which individual policy maker, unlike in the past, is required to shoulder the consequences of policy failures. There are, however, two fundamental problems with the POAS. First, as the Chief Executive is not popularly elected and the politically appointed principal officials are not responsible to the public or to the elected Legco, the POAS will only enhance the Chief Executives power to fire and hire principal officials if he finds their performance not to his liking instead of promoting democratic accountability. Second, since Hong Kong has yet to develop constitutional conventions governing the operation of individual ministerial responsibility, it is far from certain that the introduction of the POAS will enhance principal officials accountability. A case in hand to illustrate this is the penny stocks fiasco. The fiasco erupted less than one month after the introduction of the POAS, in which the local stock market lost HK$10 billion in stock value in one day caused by the ill-conceived proposal of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) to de-list stocks trading in the local market below 50 Hong Kong cents for 30 consecutive days without consolidating their shares. While both the Financial Secretary and the Secretary for the Financial Services and Treasury (SFST) are responsible for this policy area, they both refused to take responsibility, arguing that the HKEx was not a government department and the proposal was not initiated by the government, though the SFST subsequently admitted in Legco that he was sent a copy of the summary of the HKEx proposals in advance but failed to have read them before their public release. Although the Financial Secretary appointed an inquiry to look into the fiasco, there still have no signs of seeing the development and acceptance of constitutional conventions determining when and under what conditions a minister should be held responsible for indirect departmental faults (or the so-called vicarious responsibility of a minister). Likewise, before there are well established conventions governing the resignation and censure of responsible officials and regulating the relationship between politically appointed min isters and politically neutral civil servants, it remains to be seen if the POAS can really promote accountability and nurture a culture of responsible governance in the HKSAR. Accountability and Democracy Hong Kong is no democracy at the moment, with the Chief Executive being selected only by 800 privileged people and at least half of the seats in the legislature not returned by universal suffrage before 2007. Without democracy, no accountability system is secured, for not being responsible to the people, power holders will have no incentives to make the decision making process transparent, will explain and justify their decisions only at their discretions, and will not be held accountable even if their policies have already lost the confidence of the people. The POAS, as mentioned in the previous section, is flawed because principal officials are not even held responsible to the semi-democratic Legco, not to say to the people for policy failures. There is no institutional guarantee that the non-popularly elected Chief Executive will respect the judgment of the Legco and the people in issues related to the accountability of the principal officials. While it is true that the Basic Law has provisions providing for a system of accountability covering the legal, administrative, deliberative, and the political aspects, given the undemocratic nature of the present political system in the HKSAR, each and every one of this aspect needs to be reformed or strengthened if we take accountability seriously. In the case of legal accountability, while the Chief Executive is required to be accountable to the HKSAR, meaning that he shall discharge his constitutional and legal duties in the best public interest, it is far from secure that his perception of public interest will not be more in line with the 800 people whom have the power to select him than with the general public. We must also remember that Legcos power to impeach the Chief Executive in case of serious breach of law or dereliction of duties is not final, for even if the impeachment motion is carried with the support of two-third of the members, it is still up to the CPG to make the final decision to remove the Chief Executive. As regards administrative accountability, since the Commission Against Corruption and the Commission of Audit are there to check the executive authorities against corruption and inappropriate use of public expenditure, accountability will be enhanced if both Commissions are made accountable to the Legco instead of to the Chief Executive, as the latter, being the head of the HKSARG, is still part of the executive authorities whose performance and behaviour are required to be scrutinised by the Commissions concerned. Likewise, some other offices for the enhancement of administrative accountability not provided for in the Basic Law, such as the Office of the Ombudsman, should be made accountable to the Legco than to the Chief Executive. Deliberative accountability is one area in which the lack of democracy will make it highly ineffective. While the Basic Law requires the Chief Executive to present policy addresses to the Legco, the current Chief Executive Mr Tung Chee-hwa is, to say the least, most reluctant to appear before the Legco to answer questions, and his refusal to meet the public after the delivery of his Policy Address 2003 demonstrated that public deliberation of government policy will not be taken seriously without democratic accountability. Further, we must also remember that quality deliberation requires free access to relevant information. In this respect, the lack of legislation for free access to public information is a major handicap for the promotion of deliberative accountability, and a right balance must be struck in the protection of legitimate state secrets and the right of the media and the public to know about important and even sensitive official information. In addition, to further enhanc e the quality of deliberation in the Legco, Legco members and their political parties should be given more public funding to enhance their policy research capacity so that quality alternative policy proposals could be produced to compete with the governments proposals. Political accountability, in its full sense, cannot exit without full democracy, for policy makers can only legitimately exercise their political powers so long as they still have the confidence of the people. In this strict sense, the HKSAR will only have genuine political accountability the day when full democracy is introduced. This applies both to the election of the Chief Executive and of the Legco. If either one losses the mandate of the people, they have to step down from office. Under the present arrangements of a semi-democratic Legco and a Chief Executive returned by only 800 people, political accountability, at most, only applies to those Legco members who are elected by universal suffrage. This is a highly unsatisfactory situation and shows that the exercise of political power in the HKSAR falls far short of the civilised requirements of responsible government. The Basic Law nevertheless stipulates that the Executive Authorities and the Chief Executive are accountable to the Legco. They also need to get the support of the latter in matters relating to taxation and important government legislation. However, the Basic Law also gives the advantage to the Chief Executive to dissolve the Legco in case such a support is lacking in the first instance. Under the present circumstances, this executive-led feature of the political system will further undermine the ethos of accountability, for the hurdle for an elected Legco to climb in order to remove a non-popularly elected Chief Executive who has lost the confidence of the legislature is unreasonably high. Also, owing to the mixed composition of the Legco, with members returning both from indirect elections in small-sized functional/electoral constituencies and from direct elections under the proportional representative system, together with the requirement of split voting among Legco members in Leg co initiated proposals, the legislature is fragmented, making it almost impossible to form a coherent and effective alternative to the executive. The political accountability of the government to the legislature is therefore at best ineffective, at worst non-existent.

Man with the Movie Camera and the Male Gaze Essays

Man with the Movie Camera and the Male Gaze Essays Man with the Movie Camera and the Male Gaze Paper Man with the Movie Camera and the Male Gaze Paper Essay Topic: Invisible Man Man with the Movie Camera: The Male Gaze Between every audience and a film there will always lay a camera; this camera may seem transparent or not visible, but nevertheless there is a camera and a cameraperson filming the scenes. Laura Mulvey, within her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, coins the term â€Å"male gaze,† where the intermediary, the camera, is metaphorically transformed to the eyes of a male, changing how we view cinema, as well as both men and women immortalized on the silver screen. Dziga Vertov, a Soviet director, wrote and directed an avant-garde, silent documentary film called Man with the Movie Camera in 1929. Despite being famous for its anti-narrative cinematical elements, the film includes a number of narrative developments of human movement in the Soviet Union, which portray power struggles between the government, men, and women. Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera reflects Mulvey’s psychoanalytic male gaze by abstaining from the use of a visible subject or actors, its use of a wide and unusual variety of cinematic camera techniques, and a male perspective. Man with the Movie Camera lacks a clear or constant visible subject or actor, and thus supports Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in cinema. The film, instead of having recognizable characters or actors, attempts to capture the life of a camera man, very much from the camera’s perspective. Vertov includes shots of the titular camera men within the film, but many of the scenes are montage or unstaged clips of daily life. By not utilizing strongly developed characters, the audience does not have a particular perspective to view the film, other than the exclusively male cameramen, but, by including the cameramen, with their cameras, filming within the film, as well having the audience view another audience watching the same movie, Vertov brings attention to the gaze itself; that there is, in this case, a man looking through the camera and creating the scene. Mulvey says that â€Å"There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at† (200). The male gaze in the example of scenes of cameramen filming with the film itself represents this pleasure of looking and of capturing a moment. Mulvey goes on to say that: â€Å"At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy† (201). Man with the Movie Camera seems to counteract the illusion of cinema by drawing attention to the act of filming and the cameramen themselves and a lack characters. Furthermore, because the film is a silent documentary, though an orchestral soundtrack was produced to accompany the film, the characters that are present have no voice or audible connection to the audience, thus without a consistency of characters nor a voice attached to any of the subjects within the film the audience becomes aware that the camera can ultimately be an intermediary between the cameramen and them, and the illusion of narrative cinema is lost. Mulvey states that in film women are typically the objects, rather than the possessors, of gaze because the control of the camera, and thus the gaze, comes from the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience for most film genres, in this case, as a result of the male cameramen present in the film (200). Though there are no consistent human characters with Man with the Movie Camera, the camera itself seems become a subject itself. In the opening scene of the movie one of the various cameramen is positioned, by being superimposed, on top of another large, mountainous camera. In later scenes within the film, Vertov seeks to emphasize the power of the visual reach of the camera; it can go anywhere and be anywhere. For example, Vertov creates scenes in which the film superimposes a cameraman inside a glass of, women waking up and getting dressed, and a woman giving birth, and the baby being bathed. In another scene the camera is subject to simple animation in which it even evolves human movement like its cameramen. These scenes portray the gaze of the camera, thus the gaze of the man behind the camera – a literal male gaze, as having the power to film and objectify anything, from this the camera itself becomes the subject amongst a lack of actors. Man with the Movie Camera utilizes an unusually broad range of cinematic technique and staging, which reflect Mulvey’s male gaze of cinema. A majority of the scenes in the film appear to be completely not staged, as the audience is aware that the cameramen being filmed are simply attempting to gain shots of people of the Soviet Union in their everyday life and routine. By creating a seemingly realistic shot, Vertov changes â€Å"the function of film†¦ to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology†¦ and camera movements†¦, combined with invisible editing†¦ all tend to blur the limits of screen† (204). In one clip, Mikhail Kaufman, one of the cameramen, as well as Vertov’s editor, sets his camera up in a train car to film passengers sitting in a train car. Despite the people in the train car appearing staged, one child waves to the camera shyly, making the scene lose its formal, undisturbed feeling. In a similar way to voyeurism and the male gaze, Mulvey says â€Å"that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis† (204). In the case of Kaufman filming what we presume as a diegesis of natural space, according to Mulvey the male gaze of the camera, the cameramen, and the audience creates a spectacle of the natural, or unstaged, world, which, as Mulvey puts in Freudian terms, creates a voyeuristic male fantasy. The film itself does contain sexual imagery, concurrent with the male fantasy. Scenes of a camera set up in a room continuously films women waking up and getting dressed, then undressed later, which literally fulfills the fantasy of voyeuristic male fantasy. Similar to the concept of the’ peeping to,’ The Man with the Movie Camera creates an unstaged world which entertains the male gaze. Amongst other cinematic techniques include many scenes involving track shots. Track shots, so named because the camera is usually set along a track in order to control its movement, mirror a gentle progression of movement, not entirely unlike human walking or running. In this sense, the film once again recreates a natural world through comparably human movement. Other techniques, such as extreme close ups, for example of people sitting in the audience viewing the movie, the same film, within the movie in the heater present the audience with another scene in which the viewer is associated with the active subject; the camera and its gaze – or the gaze of the titular characters, and the passive, objectified individuals, as well as the masses. Lastly, Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera reflects Mulvey’s male gaze through it s portrayal of men and women through objectification. The basis of this argument comes from the assumption that the audience will take the perspective of the cameramen seen filming within the movie, whom are the only consistent characters, thus the audience will take on the gaze of the male. Mulvey says â€Å"the man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra diegetic tendencies†¦ as spectacle† (204). One of the first scenes in which women are visible on screen, is a montage of footage of cameramen working to achieve difficult or risky shots, such as sitting in front of a moving train or filming in a moving vehicle, spliced with scenes of women putting on pantyhose and braziers. This comes as a reflection of the male gaze by objectifying women through the comparison between men working with cameras and taking dangerous shots and women’s legs. In one, the men are usually facing the camera or their faces are at the very least visible to the viewer whilst they are filming, yet for the women their faces are never visible throughout this montage, only their bodies. This works on different levels to support a male gaze; it solidifies the association of the audience with the male by both showing men’s faces, and their gaze, and their relationship with the camera; women are not shown to be even capable of a gaze nor able to be equals with the male gaze by meeting it with their own. According to Mulvey, the male gaze is based upon the theory that â€Å"the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as a linchpin to the system: it is her lack [of a phallus] that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence; it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies† (198). Through this reasoning, The Man with the Movie Camera, no matter how artificial this montage may be interpreted, objectifies women as both a threat of castration and sexual objects, and portrays men as the both the men behind the camera and connected to the actively looking audience. Despite much of the film being nstaged, The Man with the Movie Camera contains a few scenes in which the events are staged or choreographed. The scene mentioned earlier, of the women getting dressed, is one of the few obvious examples of staging within the film, as well as a scene in which chess pieces are being collected in the middle of the chess board. By having scenes that are obviously staged or choreographed, especially amongst a vast majority of film that is natural, or, Vertov emphasizes such objectification. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera comes to the viewer as a reflection Laura Mulvey’s psychological male gaze by having no consistent characters or narrative development, unusual cinematic and plot techniques, and by utilizing an objectifying male gaze. Vertov’s film, much like a majority of film of the silver screen from Hollywood’s day and age, clearly had examples of a male gaze a theory from Mulvey, a much more contemporary writer, despite many of its non-traditional, anti-narrative structure.

British Constitution Master Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

British Constitution Master - Essay Example This is who we are," said Mr Brown..I will stand up for British values. I will stand up for a strong Britain and I will always stand for you" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtmlxml=/news/2007/09/24/nlabour1324.xml British constitution has never been an absolutely rigid constitution. It establishes the fundamental laws and judicial review of legislation and administrative law is not totally bifurcated from constitution law. "A distinction is commonly drawn in continental countries between constitutional law and administrative law; but because English law is not codified or officially systematized, English jurists have found difficulty in determining the distinction" Jackson, Hood and Leopold (2001, p.9). The British constitution and the constitution law, definition of both are rather controversial, though the scope is unlimited because it covers all aspects of the relationship between individuals and authorities. Fundamental law of the state does not remain unalterable, and British constitution is the result of constitutional conventions as the constitution still stands unwritten. It declares Parliamentary Sovereignty (now with the European dimension), with autonomous power to the judiciary, which could sometimes, momentarily thwart any government effort1. Then Britain has to reckon with the EU and the connected laws, where most of the British laws were undermined and become subordinate to the EU laws. European Court of Justice can overrule all the acts of the Member Countries and the Courts in every member country, including Britain are asked to uphold the EU justice. In Britain this has become an issue of contention that Community law could override national laws. There are argume nts that British/People's/Parliamentary sovereignty is undermined and Constitution has lost its place. The limited sovereignty of the Member States still remains a difficult issue to gulp down not only in Britain, but also in many other member states. In addition, European Convention on Human Rights singed in 1950 could be considered as another encroachment in the national sovereignty. The decisions of the Court of Human Rights no doubt, are not directly enforceable depending on the circumstances; but it is coming closer. With the threat of home grown and external terrorism, Temporary Provisions are added into Prevention of Terrorism Act, 1989, might encroach individual rights in more ways than one. "Although constitutional theory tightly binds legitimacy and power with Parliamentary accountability, accountability and impartiality are considered to be increased by excluding certain functions from the constraints and influence of ministerial responsibility" Flinders (2002, P.17). Another issue that could threaten the constitution is the status of parliamentary sovereignty in Scotland, and the Queen's status was disputed on a few occasions2. Treaty and Acts of Union have been contested and the confusion still persists. "At any rate, with this possible, but unclear, exception for Scotland, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in the United Kingdom remains probably the most basic tenet of our constitutional law," Yardley (1995, p.25). Under the British Constitution, even though Parliament is supreme, House of Lords, represented by hereditary and created peers continue to exist. The twelve Lords of Appeal