Emily Lau Wai-hing, JP (Chinese: 劉慧卿; born 21 January 1952) is a politician in Hong Kong who champions press freedom and human rights.

She later noted, "My passion for politics began to develop in 1982, when China told Britain that it would impose a settlement on Hong Kong if the two sides could not reach an agreement by 1984.

[2] In December 1984, after signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Hong Kong to give a press conference.

Lau questioned Thatcher: "Prime Minister, two days ago you signed an agreement with China promising to deliver over 5 million people into the hands of a communist dictatorship.

[4][5] Lau was also involved with the Hong Kong Journalists Association during this period, serving first as an executive committee member, then vice-chair and finally chairperson from 1989 to 1991.

Governor Patten carried out the reform packages which extended voting rights to millions of people in the revised functional constituency indirect elections.

In 1993, Lau tabled a motion to seek assurances of right of abode in Britain for the British National (Overseas) passport holders in case they were expelled from Hong Kong after 1997.

[6] In October 1994, Lau led legislators in urging Britain to grant full citizenship to 3.5 million native Hong Kong British Dependent Territories Citizens (BDTC).

As part of this action, she led a cross-party delegation of Hong Kong legislators to Britain to lobby government and opposition politicians ahead of the LegCo debate.

[2] Lau also participated in street protests and in December 1996 she scuffled with the riot police outside the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre together with Andrew Cheng and Lee Cheuk-yan, while demonstrating outside the closed-door election for the post-handover Chief executive.

Over the months leading up to the July 1997 handover, Lau urged the Chief executive-designate Tung Chee-hwa to stand up against Beijing, since his "unreserved support" for the Beijing-hand-picked Provisional Legislative Council resulted in the abolishment or modification of important Hong Kong laws covering human rights and civil liberties.

In March of the same year Lau called for the boycott of Hong Kong's future first election under PRC rule, condemning the voting system as unfair and the proportional representation as highly favouring pro-Beijing candidates.

[2] After the handover in 1998 she was required to relinquish her British passport and adopt Chinese citizenship to be eligible in running for the 1998 Hong Kong legislative election.

[2] Lau led The Frontier to put pressure on the government for an early democratisation of Hong Kong and was an outspoken critic of a number of LedCo motions, especially on the topic of human rights; she was also sceptical of the reliability of the "One country, two systems" principle.

In terms of economics policy, she supported legislation on fair trading, opposed the import of foreign labour and called for the introduction of a minimum wage.

Lau co-founded the Coalition Against Second Term (CAST) to draw attention to the flawed process of choosing the Chief executive, the lack of competition and the need for real democracy.

In 2003, she and another legislator, James To of the Democratic Party, attended a seminar entitled "Hong Kong Under One Country, Two Systems" organised by a pro-Taiwan independence group headed by former ROC President Lee Teng-hui.

[10] Her subsequent refusal to explicitly recognise Taiwan as a part of the PRC during an interview again drew criticism from more conservative sectors of the Hong Kong society, including attacks from pro-Beijing politician Leung Chun-ying, who became Chief executive in 2012.

In the Chief executive election held in 2005 after unpopular Tung Chee-hwa stepped down, Lau announced her interest in running for the post, to foster discussions over Hong Kong's democratic development.

Democratic Party chairman Lee Wing-tat remained the sole pro-democratic candidate in this election, but he did not manage to secure the threshold of 100 nominations necessary for the job.

[13] On 24 May 2010, Emily Lau and Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho, together with veteran Cheung Man-kwong met with Beijing representatives headed by Li Gang, the deputy director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong, for negotiations over the 2012 constitutional reform package.

[20] The last British Governor Chris Patten regarded Lau as a "professional politician, handsome, well informed and dashingly eloquent, who would have got to the top in any Western political system" and an "exponent of the incisive soundbite.