Freedom of expression rights vs. legislative oaths

Alright, I finally finished my 'homework' this week and handed it off. For those of you who don't know, I was doing some work for the HK Human Rights Monitor for the past few weeks. Basically, (and you can probably tune out at this point, since most of this stuff bores the heck out of everyone I have actually told) the title of this post explains what I was doing. You see, a bunch of legislators in Hong Kong did some things that didn't please China. There was a group that went to testify in front of the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee and another legislator who spoke publicly in favour of Taiwan having the right to decide for themselves if they wanted to be part of China. In (what I think was)a very creative move, some Chinese politicians decided to accuse these HK legislators of breaching their oaths of office - oaths that have them swear to uphold the Basic Law (which is HK's constitution) and the 'one-China' policy.

My job was to research whether there was any substantive basis in international law behind China's accusations. In other words, whether taking an oath of office could lead to one being restricted in what one could say. One of the legislators involved was supposed to take part in a public debate, and my organization was trying to gather some legal arguments that could be made.

For those of you in law, you understand how confusing and complicated international law can be. I focused on United Nations (the Human Rights Committee), European Union (the European Court of Human Rights), United States, and Hong Kong jurisprudence. I can't give any firm conclusions (since I'm not an expert in int'l law) but given what I've read, there were no legal decisions or statutes that the China politicians could have used to support their accusations.

Okay, when I was trying to explain this to my family, I think I bored them to tears. I couldn't understand, since I found this to be so fascinating.....hmmmm....maybe law really could be the right career for me......