HKU Bulletin April 2006 (Vol. 7 No. 2)

13 Professor Retires to the Hot Seat Y ash Ghai, formerly Sir Y.K. Pao Professor of Public Law, is retiring, but not to a life of peaceful contemplation and research. On his plate are some of the world’s most troubled countries where his work is far from done. Professor Ghai was named the United Nations (UN) Secretary- General’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia in November, a post he will likely stay in for three years. He also was brought in last summer to advise on Iraq’s new constitution, with an understanding that his input could soon be required again. Those appointments followed years advising on constitutional issues in the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, his homeland Kenya and, of course, Hong Kong. And all along, this modest, approachable man has kept up with his academic duties. “I like to think of myself first and foremost as a scholar and teacher. There’s an interaction between my academic and political work. My experience means I can talk to students about practical issues and it benefits my research,” he said. “I’m trying not to take on a lot of new commitments now. I would like to give a fair amount of my time to research, but it was hard to say no to the appointment in Cambodia.” Professor Ghai is an ideal diplomat in this troubled country, with his scholarly demeanour and his devotion to the law. However, despite a desire to establish a good working relationship with the government, he has been compelled to speak out publ icly against the repressive policies of Pr ime Minister Hun Sen’s regime. “I was surprised when I took on this job how much people there look t o t h e UN ’s representat ive to speak up for their rights. Yet it is quite important that I do so. Local groups have been sidelined and people cannot put the pressure on government that you would expect in a civil society. They don’t have any other outlet to air their grievances,” he said. Human rights and its close cousin, the development of democracy, have been at the core of Professor Ghai’s work over the years. He took unpaid leave from the University from 2000 to early 2004 to lead Kenya in drafting a new constitution, in a highly transparent, participatory process. Although the exercise ended in futility – the Kenyan president objected to having his powers trimmed and so amended the draft – the electorate rejected that draft, giving hope that their preferences will win out in the end. Hong Kong has also offered Professor Ghai the opportunity to participate in matters of utmost legal importance. He came here in 1989 from the University of Warwick, interested in studying the change of sovereignty. During the 1990s he was an advisor to the Mainland government, wrote the definitive textbook on the Basic Law, entitled Hong Kong’s New Constitutional Order , and sat on a committee investigating the compatability of Hong Kong laws with the Basic Law. As time went on, however, he and Mainland officials found themselves at odds on a number of issues. “I was unable to give the advice they wanted so I was asked less and less to give advice. I’ve really not had much to do with them in recent years,” he said. Nonetheless, he has kept a close watch on developments. He believes there has been a high level of continuity in the law since the 1997 handover – with the exceptions of the Bill of Rights and the Public Order Ordinance – but the lack of democracy had resulted in people turning to the courts to solve political problems. This put the courts in a difficult position, particularly when the Chinese government had a strong view on an issue. “If Hong Kong becomes more democratic, then some of the pressure will be taken off,” Professor Ghai predicted. Professor Ghai will return to Kenya later this year with his wife, former Law Faculty member Jill Cottrell, after completing a third edition of Hong Kong’s New Constitutional Order . Despite his other commitments, he hopes to devote a fair amount of time to research. “I have been working on ethnic conflict for years, how laws or constitutions can help or aggravate ethnic tensions. There has been more progress in the last 25 years than the previous 200 years. This is the big age of constitution-making and it has been critical in trying to resolve internal conflicts,” he said. RESEARCH 12 Probing the Brains of Men who Abuse M en who physical ly abuse thei r fami l ies have subt le differences in their brains when it comes to impulse control and cognitive function, preliminary research in the Neuropsychology Laboratory has found. In one of the first studies of its kind, admitted domestic batterers have been asked to perform cognitive and emotion- related tasks whi le their brain activity is scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). More than 20 people have participated so far, including a control group. “The batterers in our study seem to have weaker impulse control and a greater sensitivity towards aggressive stimuli,” said Dr Tatia Lee, Associate Professor and Director of the Neuropsychology Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. She has been leading the research conducted by her PhD. candidate, Miss Siu-Ching Chan . The volunteers performed two tests. The first one looked at how their brains filtered out distractions. The subjects were given a list of colour words printed in a different colour of ink (eg, the word ‘green’ in orange ink), then asked to read the word. “You expect to see activity in certain areas of the brain when you perform this kind of cognitive regulation exercise, but there wasn’t a strong signal from the batterers. They could still perform the test correctly, but they didn’t have brain activity where you expect it to be. Maybe it’s happening elsewhere in their brain or maybe it’s not as active as it should be,” Lee said. In the second test they were asked to compare aggressive and neutral words. The batterers showed a bias towards more aggressive language, she said. “This is prel iminary data, but i f we venture further speculation, we could say that batterers are more drawn to emotionality and less able to cognitively regulate their behaviour. This is not a theory, it’s speculation, but it may explain the phenomena of domestic violence,” Lee said. While further research was needed, the findings could ultimately have impl ications in treating perpetrators of domestic violence in terms of upgrading cognitive control and downgrading emotional responses, she said. The on-going project, which was reported on the BBC programme, The Science of Aggression , is an extension of earlier work that Lee and her colleagues have done on cognitive and affective regulation of behaviour including impulse control, deception and emotion recognition. “In parallel to our other work, we’d noticed an increase in reported cases of domestic violence so we decided to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of that,” she said. Lee has also overseen research that shows women and men tap into different areas of their brain in response to emotional stimuli. Women in her study responded through the ‘feeling’ area of the brain, whereas men used the ‘recall’ area of the brain, evaluating their current emotional experiences with reference to past factual events. She has also led other studies that found cognitive regulation declined with age, and heroin abusers had poor control in cognitive behaviour tests.