The Public Offices (Candidacy and Taking Up Offices) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Ordinance 2021 () is an ordinance to amend the Oaths and Declarations Ordinance () and other relating legislation which adds new requirements for the Chief Executive, Executive Council members, Legislative Council members and judges and other judicial officers, imposes oath-taking requirements on District Council members, and specifies requirements for candidates to swear to uphold the Basic Law and bear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region when assuming office or standing for election and also adds new grounds and mechanism for disqualification from holding the office or being nominated as a candidate. The ordinance was seen as another round of the Beijing authorities to bar the opposition from standing in elections or holding public offices and also raised concerns on the bill's vague parameters of the oath with such over-reaching scope would undermine Hong Kong's judicial independence.
Background
Article 104 of the Basic Law of Hong Kong and the Oaths and Declarations Ordinance () originally stated that five categories of public officers, Chief Executive, principal officials, members of the Executive Council and of the Legislative Council, judges of the courts at all levels and other members of the judiciary must "swear to uphold the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China and swear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" when assuming office. However, penalty for violating the oath was not specified in the laws, and the District Councillors were not included in the categories.
In the 2016 New Territories East by-election for the Legislative Council, pro-independence activist Edward Leung ran for the office and fared a better-than-expected result by obtaining more than 15 per cent of the popular vote. In the following general election in September, the returning officers unprecedentedly invalidated Edward Leung and five other localists' nominations for their pro-independence inclination. The decision was challenged by the leading lawyers in Hong Kong, who questioned whether returning officers had the power to investigate the "genuineness" of candidates' declarations and accordingly disqualify their candidacies. In their joint statement, it wrote that "[the Section 40 of the Legislative Council Ordinance] does not give the returning officer any power to inquire into the so-called genuineness of the candidates' declarations, let alone making a subjective and political decision to disqualify a candidate without following any due process on the purported ground that the candidate will not genuinely uphold the Basic Law." It also wrote that "arbitrary and unlawful exercise of powers by government officials ... are most damaging to the rule of law in Hong Kong."
In the end, there were still six localist camp candidates who ran on the "right to self-determination" of Hong Kong got elected with 19 per cent of total vote share. Two localist legislators-elect, Baggio Leung and Yau Wai-ching of Youngspiration used the largely ritual oath-taking ceremony on the inaugural meeting of the Legislative Council on 12 October 2016 to protest, asserting "as a member of the Legislative Council, I shall pay earnest efforts in keeping guard over the interests of the Hong Kong nation," displayed a "Hong Kong is not China" banner, and mispronounced "People's Republic of China" as "people's re-fucking of Chee-na". As a result, Leung and Yau, as well as some other pro-democrats' oaths were invalidated by the Legislative Council President Andrew Leung. Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen also launched a judicial review against the duo. On 7 November 2016, the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) controversially interpreted Article 104 of the Basic Law of Hong Kong to "clarify" the requirements that the legislators need to swear allegiance to Hong Kong as part of China when they take office, stating that a person "who intentionally reads out words which do not accord with the wording of the oath prescribed by law, or takes the oath in a manner which is not sincere or not solemn" should be barred from taking their public office and cannot retake the oath. As a result, Baggio Leung and Yau Wai-ching were unseated by the court, followed by four other opposition legislators, Leung Kwok-hung, Nathan Law, Lau Siu-lai and Yiu Chung-yim who were also disqualified for their oath-taking manner on 14 July 2017.