Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, the Chinese Temples Ordinance is similar to Taiwan’s Supervision of Temples Act in terms of enactment timing, legislative objectives and regulatory targets. However, the Ordinance is substantially more onerous both in terms of the heavy burdens imposed on Chinese religions, and the broad discretionary powers vested in the government. The Ordinance survived a constitutional challenge in 2000 that only assessed the Ordinance vis-à-vis property rights. Attempts to water down the Ordinance in 2015 has stalled amidst objections premised on fraud and ‘pseudo-religious establishments’ associated Chinese religions. Religious sexual fraud and religious property fraud are tackled via general criminal offence. For religious sexual fraud, the existence of the procurement offence which explicitly punishes the use of any type of false representations to obtain of sex provides a straightforward legal avenue. There is highly selective employment of the procurement offence to primarily target religious sexual fraud to the exclusion of the other possible types of sexual fraud. This vigorous prosecutions is complemented by the Hong Kong courts’ inherent—and sometime explicit—rejection of any purported religious practices that involved sex. For religious property fraud, there is a steady stream of prosecutions via general fraud offences. The surveyed court judgments all involved guilty pleas, possibly due to the fact that the vast majority of cases involved objectively demonstrable falsehood (e.g., bait and switch).