Dec. 21 (UPI) -- Hong Kong's top court on Monday ruled in favor of the government's use of colonial-era emergency powers to institute a ban on face masks at protests, overturning a lower court's ruling that had found the prohibition unconstitutional.
The five judges of the Court of Final Appeal unanimously ruled Monday that Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam was within her right in October of last year to use emergency powers not invoked since 1967 to ban face masks at protests, rallies and marches dealing a blow to the opposition.
The ruling overturns a judgement from the Hong Kong High Court, which said in November of last year that the ban was "incompatible" with the former British colony's constitution, stating the restriction on rights outweighed the danger masks posed to the public.
In the 71-page ruling, the court said the Hong Kong chief executive, the top politician in the former British colony, has the ability under the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to enact any law during an emergency and that the lower court failed to take into consideration those who sustained damages or injuries due to the protests.
The five judges also said it was constitutional for the chief executive to invoke the emergency ordnance that ban was founded on.
"The interests of Hong Kong as a whole should be taken into account since the rule of law itself was being undermined by the actions of masked lawbreakers who, with their identities concealed, were seemingly free to act with impunity," the ruling said.
The mask ban was petitioned by opposition lawmakers who resigned in protest last month to a new law by China that allows for the removal of "unpatriotic" legislators.
The judges in their ruling on Monday said it was made in the context of the right to peaceful assembly while describing the protests at the time the law was passed as increasing in "violence and lawlessness."
"The ban on facial coverings can be regarded as a relatively minor incursion into the relevant rights on which the applicants rely," the ruling said. "As we have said, this does not lie at the heart of the right of peaceful assembly."
The protests erupted in June of 2019 against a proposed extradition law critics feared would be used to try Beijing critics residing in Hong Kong before pro-Communist Party courts on the mainland.
The protests escalated in size and grew to encompass wider pro-democracy demands in response to violent police crack downs on demonstrators.
The mask ban was issued four months into the protests in an effort to quell them through preventing demonstrators from obscuring their identities but was ruled against a month later.
However, this past June, the Beijing government instituted a draconian and widely condemned national security law on Hong Kong to criminalize anti-Beijing acts with stiff punishments.
The ruling was made Monday also as the local government is encouraging the public to wear masks in order to stymie the spread of the coronavirus.
