Seditious civil servants and whither the presumption of "innocent until proven guilty" in Hong Kong?

  

What kind of protestor dresses like this?  A Hong Kong protestor

who I'm guessing's a banker, lawyer or senior civil servant, that's who!

 

As a civil servant friend of mine told me years ago, it would be unseemly for him to be seen out protesting against the government even though part of him wanted to accompany his wife to the pro-democracy protests she regularly attended.  But in a demonstration of how much and strong was the opposition to the extradition bill proposed by Carrie Lam, an anti-extradition bill protest rally was held in Central on August 2nd, 2019, that was organized by civil servants. 

 

Just a little over three years on though, such an event would be an impossibility.  And so far has the political pendulum swung to the other side in Hong Kong that what would have been hard to imagine back in 2019 has now happened: i.e., the arrest of civil servants for sedition; with (at least) four having taken place this month alone.

 

As an AFP wire piece reporting on the two latest arrests (which took place yesterday) noted: "Sedition is a colonial-era offence that has been dusted off to snuff out dissent after Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong two years ago"; and "More than one-fifth of the 128 people prosecuted for national security offences in the city faced charges such as "uttering seditious words" and "attempting to act with seditious intention".  

 

This from the Hong Kong Free Press article reporting on the arrests: "A police statement published on Tuesday evening identified the pair as “administrators of a social media group,” with local media reporting it was the Civil Servants Secrets Facebook page.  “They were suspected of publishing posts on that social media group to disseminate seditious messages that promote feelings of ill-will and enmity between different classes of the population of Hong Kong,” the police said." 

 

What the police allege sounds so very heavy.  So let's walk it all back a bit shall we?  Consider this other section from the same article: "The Civil Servants Secrets page made posts – sometimes of a critical nature – relating to government policies. People could make submissions to reveal the internal operations of government departments or air grievances about rules and regulations imposed on civil servants"; with "[o]ne of the last posts made on the page [featuring] a video of a police officer putting his firearms away and taking a nap while on duty, according to local media."   

 

So... we're really basically just talking about people casually posting shop talk, bitching about their work, their colleagues and their bosses on Facebook?!  Something that I'm sure many (millions, billions?) of people do on social media!  Fortunately for the vast majority of those folks, they are not civil servants, Hong Kongers or both.  Because it really is the case that, in National Security Law-era Hong Kong, people can and will be arrested for "speech crimes" and even "thought crimes".  

 

More than by the way: note that the two fellows arrested yesterday, identified as civil servants employed at the Home Affairs Department and the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, were arrested in their capacity as moderators of that Civil Servants Secrets page.  In other words: they may and probably did not even write the posts that are deemed dangerous to national security!  (Although they were arrested for sedition rather than for a national security law crime, they were arrested by the national security -- rather than "regular" -- police.)

 

AFP reporter Xinqi Su Tweeted yesterday that: "As at 5 Aug [i.e., last Friday], a total of 211 persons had been arrested over national security ground. 128 individuals and 5 companies had been prosecuted. More than 1/5 of those charged were prosecuted over seditious offences. 13 had been convicted and 6 of them were convicted under the NSL."  I don't know about you but that seems like a lot of people arrested in recent years for endangering national security to me.  This not least since before July 1st, 2020, no one had been arrested for doing so in Hong Kong!

Another disturbing statistic: "at 30-Jun-2022, a record 2,701 unconvicted people are being held in HK jails without bail, comprising a record 36% of the jail population, up from 2,552 on 31-Mar."  (Go here for detailed charts and stats.)  So much for the common law presumption of "innocent until proven guilty", huh?  

 

In a "thank goodness for small mercies" move: the civil servants arrested yesterday (which turned out to be four in number in an updated report) were released on bail today -- but need to report to the police in early November.  Also, as per a policy which came to be known in 2019 (after the arrest of a number of government employees at anti-extradition bill/pro-democracy protests), it's become standard practice for arrested civil servants to be suspended if and when under police investigation.  So, again, so much for the presumption of innocence until proven guilty -- one more sign that in Hong Kong these days, we have not so much rule of law as rule by law (and lawfare).  And, also, how "absurdity becomes normality in Hong Kong". :(