Our aims in creating BLDHO

The idea for this database arose during the 2005 constitutional law debate concerning the term of office of the new Chief Executive. The debate raised questions about the meaning of and intention behind some of the words used in the Basic Law, and it was thought that the drafting history might provide answers to these questions. Indeed the Chinese and Hong Kong governments did make reference to drafting materials, but some of them were not accessible to ordinary members of the public. This lack of access led us to ponder how much of the drafting materials were publicly available in Hong Kong and how could they be accessed. Research revealed that no official set of the complete drafting materials existed in Hong Kong, the available drafting materials were scattered amongst different libraries, and a substantial quantity of drafting materials, particularly those from the sub-groups of the Basic Law Drafting Committee, was unavailable. With this background, the aims of BLDHO are three-fold:

BLDHO was originally launched in July 2006 and enhanced in 2008. In 2024, the database was upgraded to allow for full-text searching.

Acknowledgements

BLDHO is a research output of the Constitutional Law Project funded by the University of Hong Kong's URC Strategic Research Areas and Themes initiative and the Faculty of Law. I wish to thank Agnes Liu for her excellent research work and to Dave Low for his tireless efforts in developing the original system. Thanks also to the HKU Libraries people, particularly Nelly Cheang, Terry Chung, Kayla Ng, Ivy Chan, David Palmer, Irene Shieh and Iris Chan, for their wonderful cooperative efforts. I also thank Alex Cheng, Bonnie Cheng, Seren Tang, Peter Chau, Lison Harris, Angela Lai, Ernest Ng, Pinky Choy and Xing Fei for all their helpful research and other assistance. I am also grateful for the support and advice from Hualing Fu, Tony Ju Liu, Johannes Chan, Albert Chen, Yash Ghai, P.Y. Lo, Alan Hoo SC and others who have provided feedback on the system.