Following an internal meeting on Tuesday, pan-democrat lawmakers have decided to run for the positions of chair and deputy chair of every committee of the Legislative Council.
The pan-democrat lawmakers made this decision after they were notified that they will not be allocated the number of chairs that they would normally have expected, according to the ratio of the number of lawmakers.
Lawmaker Cyd Ho, who is the convenor of the internal pan-democrats’ meetings, said at a press conference that the pro-Beijing camp “should respect the tradition that the number of chair positions are allocated according to the number of seats of the two main camps. Pan-democrats usually occupy more than one-third to 40 percent of the seats in LegCo, and we have 38.9 percent of the seats in this term.”
“However, according to the message we have received from the pro-Beijing camp, we will only get the chairs of the panel on health services and the panel on welfare services.” She added, “It means we would only get nine percent of the chair positions; it is very unbalanced and shows the pro-Beijing camp is very tyrannical.”
Democratic Party chair Emily Lau and lawmaker Sin Chung-kai will run for the chairmanship of the finance committee and the house committee respectively. Candidates for other committees were yet to be decided.
Lau said, “We are prepared for the fact that we may not get a single seat, but we want society to see the hideous faces of these people [the pro-Beijing camp].
