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In 2009, Liberal Studies, which can be used as a platform for human rights education, was newly introduced as a compulsory subject for the senior secondary students in Hong Kong. As teacher's attitudes impact students' learning largely, a survey was conducted in 2010 to measure Liberal Studies teachers' attitudes towards human rights. This article focuses on the development and validation of the questionnaire instrument measuring Liberal Studies teachers' human rights attitudes, which is one of the pioneers in Asian societies. The dimensions of the instrument were first explored by exploratory factor analysis, and were confirmed to include Social Welfare, Civilian Constraints, Personal Liberties, Equality, Privacy -School Management and Privacy -Others. Then, the six-dimensional instrument was validated by confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch analysis. It is expected that it will serve as a base to build a potential tool for comparative study of human rights attitudes in Asian societies.

This empirical study shows age makes a difference in how people evaluate Hong Kong’s legal and political institutions amid the former British colony’s chronic democratic deficit and rising political discontent since its return to Chinese rule in 1997. Using data from a 2015 survey of 3525 local residents conducted 6 months after the end of the ‘Umbrella Movement’ – a pro-democracy protest lasting 79 days, it reveals a glaring gap between older and younger people in their evaluations of Hong Kong’s electoral system and human rights, and more importantly, the latter’s rising localist sentiment. If perceived illegitimacy of a regime discourages legal compliance, these findings do not bode well for Hong Kong’s long-term governance. The largely youth-led protests that erupted in the summer of 2019 against a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed extradition to Mainland China, which plunged the city into its worst political crisis since 1997, are ominous signs.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasizes that the education of the child should be directed to the development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. However, though Hong Kong is a one of the States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the government does not put much emphasis on promoting Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children’s rights education is not compulsory in schools or in teacher training institutions in Hong Kong. It is detrimental if teachers do not possess adequate knowledge and positive attitudes towards children’s rights as they hold a crucial role in educating children about their rights and nurturing rights-respecting students. Through modifying Rogers and Wrightsman’s Children’s Rights Attitudes Scale, the present research examined pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards children’s self-determination rights, nurturance rights, and the conflict between self-determination and nurturance rights, and also their knowledge of children’s rights, in order to uncover the areas of improvements.