Hong Kong activists take Queen's Pier row to court

HONG KONG, July 31 (Reuters) Civic activists fighting to save a colonial-era Hong Kong pier won a reprieve today after a High Court judge agreed to hear an application challenging the government's decision to dismantle it.

Fifty-year-old Queen's Pier - once a quiet harbourfront site in the city's financial heart - has become a civic battleground, pitting heritage groups against a development-happy government that wants the pier removed to allow for reclamation and roadworks.

With workers and heavy machinery hovering near the stark, pillared structure, activists lodged a last-gasp judicial review yesterday which was accepted by High Court Judge Johnson Lam.

The plea centres on the legality of a decision by a former government official not to declare Queen's Pier a historic monument - which would have saved it.

A panel of heritage experts had earlier deemed the Pier to be of ''outstanding merit'' and should be preserved, a view ignored by government.

''We are happy that the court noticed that this case is actually arguable,'' said Chu Hoi-dick, an activist with Local Action, who filed the judicial review along with a colleague.

''We have some very dignified arguments about civil space, about the preservation of history, about the accountability of the government,'' Chu added.

While Justice Lam said he was following normal procedures in allowing the judicial review to proceed, he added that it ''didn't mean the application would succeed''.

A government spokesperson was quoted by RTHK radio as saying the judicial review wouldn't affect its handling of the site, and that demolition work wouldn't likely commence before legal matters were resolved.

A hearing will be held next Tuesday to determine the fate of the pier - a symbolic landing point for former British governors and visiting Royalty, including Queen Elizabeth in 1975.

The government has offered to reconstruct it later at a new site in an apparent compromise.

The 11th hour reprieve comes amid growing public pressure to save the well-loved site. A band of vocal activists have camped out at the pier for months, erected banners and refused to leave.

Chan King-fai, 25, is one of several activists who've been on a four-day hunger strike over the pier's likely demise.

''We feel there can't be continued demolition of things like this, a bulldozer style of high-speed development,'' Chan said.

Others streamed to the pier on Tuesday with a government order having been issued to evict the site by midnight.

''It's like (the government) is hurting the feelings of Hong Kong's citizens,'' said Kenneth Hui, a university medical student who was taking valedictory photographs of the pier with his girlfriend on what he feared would be its last open day.

REUTERS ARB HS1817