Legal arenas are (also) protest arenas in Hong Kong these days

It looks calm after the storm (but) the spectre of the security 

law, bureau and associated remain to darken moods

(Spot the hotel turned security bureau building?) 

Is justice still guarded -- or is it more a case of the courts

being policed these days --in Hong Kong?

Despite being conferred T9 status for a few hours, Typhoon Higos turned out to be a bit of a damp squid -- especially compared to the mighty Mangkhut which blew through Hong Kong in September 2018 and thoroughly justified its T10 status.  Even though it was still a serious T8 when I woke up yesterday morning, it didn't seem noticeably windier or wetter than a non-typhoon rain storm -- and, unlike with Mangkhut, it didn't seem to leave that much debris or damage in its wake.  

So life returned to normal pretty quickly yesterday -- well, as normal as things can be during these pandemic and security law times.  On the Wuhan coronavirus front: touch wood but things are indeed looking up -- with the number of new daily cases continuing on a downslide; with Hong Kong reporting 26 yesterday and a six-week low of 18 new infections today.  So it's back to worrying and fixating most on threats to freedoms -- and for the record, recently released results of the latest Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) poll shows that those surveyed reckon that the degrees of freedom, prosperity, compliance with the rule of law, stability and democracy (which collectively are described as the "five core social indicators") in Hong Kong are at the lowest level since June 1997.

The fact of the matter is that we really don't need to look all that far to find the reasons for many Hong Kongers' fears and dissatisfaction.  In addition to the much publicized threats to press freedom (that were made abundantly clear for the world to see last week),  we are also seeing a clamping down on freedom in the education sector that could well see a mass exodus of international school teachers as well as eminent university professors.  Throw in the sense that the legal system as Hong Kongers have long known it is also under threat and it's easy enough to understand how there has come to be a growing and pervasive fear felt by Hong Kongers (even while defiance and resilience undoubtedly remain) that makes it now a very different Hong Kong from even just a few months ago.     

With opposition having largely moved away from mass street protests to other means, the courts have become key arenas to contest a large number of protest- and rights-related cases and issues.  Sometimes, there have been victories; other times defeats; and at still other times, decisions that fail to completely satisfy either camp (and consequently get appealed and turn into cases that run and run and run). 

In addition there also are those times when attempted contests are stopped before they can even get into court -- like Legislative Councillor Ted Hui's crowdfunded private prosecution against a police officer who shot a student in the abdomen from close range with live ammunition in Sai Wan Ho last November 11th.  Earlier this week, Justice Secretary Teresa Cheng (whose net -53 percent unpopularity rivals Carrie Lam's net -54 percent!) intervened to have the case blocked and dropped.  And she's done the same thing with another legal proceeding that Ted Hui (who is in possession of legal credentials too, by the way) initiated: this one against a taxi driver accused of ramming protesters with his vehicle in Sham Shui Po last October. 

As historian Jeppe Mulich suggested in a Tweet, "Teresa Cheng is working hard to block every avenue for accountability left in Hong Kong."  For his part, Ted Hui reckons that "Teresa Cheng's action is overriding the rule of law with rule of man"; a statement that got me recalling lawyer Kevin Yam's fatalistic comments about the security law back on June 21st: "Don’t analyse the #HongKong National Security Law. There’s nothing to analyse. It’s just whatever they say it is. And if they cannot make it whatever they say it is when they want something, they will just change it in whatever way they like. End of story."   

To be sure, it can still look at times like the wheels of justice are still running in Hong Kong.   For example, it's been announced this evening that six more men have been on suspicion of rioting and conspiracy to wound in connection with the mob attack at Yuen Long MTR station on July 21st, 2019; bringing the total number of people arrested in relation to that horrific event up to 43.  Here's the thing though: more than a year later, only seven of those individuals have been charged -- and, if I'm not mistaken, no one has been found guilty and sent to jail for their crimes.  Actually, I'm not sure whether any Yuen Long attacker has spent any (significant amount of) time in custody.

On the other hand, Tong Ying-kit, the first person charged under China's draconian security law for Hong Kong -- arrested on the first full day that the law went into effect this past July 1st -- has been held in custody all this time since he was denied bail.  Tomorrow will see the High Court ruling on whether he has been detained lawfully after his lawyers filed a writ of habeus corpus.  How the decision goes should tell us how successful Hong Kong's lawyers can be in their efforts to make sure that justice (still) will be served in Hong Kong.

More than incidentally, the head of Tony Ying-kit's legal team is Philip Dykes.  Apart from being the current head of the Bar Association,  he is on the record as worrying that the national security law "sounds like a reverse engineering of the ill-fated extradition bill. Rather than you going to the mainland, the mainland comes to you."  Tomorrow's court decision could well give (further) credence to his suggestion.