Friday, December 30, 2022

China's National People's Congress Standing Committee deals a death blow to Hong Kong judicial independence

 
Sign spotted in the city this month (I get the feeling
the cleaners tried to erase it but weren't wholly successful)
 
 
On the face of it, the NPCSC's intepretion can look like China is affirming the "One country, two systems"; something that would be a welcome move.  But, as more than one legal expert has already pointed out, what's in fact happened is further damaging to the rule of law and concept of an independent judiciary in Hong Kong.
 
 
 
 
More from Eric Lai: Beijing's "interpretation today creates a de facto Political-Legal Committee for Hong Kong: judicial independence vanishes when the executive authorities can override court decision without being challenged by judicial review".  And even a lay person like me can see that when judicial independence is no more, the courts are inevitably going to just hand in decisions that will please Hong Kong's executive body: meaning every national security ruling will be in favor of government prosecutors; with everybody who is charged with having committed a national security law crime inevitably being found guilty and never ever being found to be innocent.  
 
 
Even before today's ruling, it wasn't as though national security law-era Hong Kong was a good place for lawyers and others seeking for justice to be served.  In the past 24 hours or so, a Reuters piece about Hong Kong human rights lawyers fleeing abroad amid an effort to cleanse the city of dissent has been circulated on Twitter by the likes of Kevin Yam (who was interviewed for it) and Samuel Bickett -- two lawyers who used to live and work in Hong Kong but now most reluctantly don't.  The following excerpt from this lengthy investigative piece written by four journalists should give a sense of Hong Kong's serious legal brain drain: 
Facing or fearing prosecution under the law, or concerned about threats to Hong Kong’s freedoms, many lawyers and legal academics have quietly departed, mostly to Britain, Australia and North America. 

One Hong Kong solicitor who has relocated to England told Reuters that she knew of at least 80 Hong Kong lawyers who had moved to Britain since the security law was imposed in June 2020. Another lawyer, now living in Australia, estimated that several dozen Hong Kong lawyers had moved there.

Some are preparing for the possibility they may never return. Kevin Yam, a commercial solicitor and now vocal critic of Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, said he took his mother’s ashes with him when he departed for Melbourne in April. “I wanted to be fully prepared, given the way Hong Kong is going,” Yam said. “If I couldn’t ever get back to Hong Kong, I didn’t want to leave her there.”

And the following excerpt -- about what former legal constituency represenative Dennis Kwok endured before leaving in November 2020 -- should explain why these lawyers have decided to leave Hong Kong, many for good:

In mid-2020, Kwok found GPS tracking devices under his car “twice in one week,” he said. He provided Reuters with a picture of one of the devices – a small, black rectangular case containing a SIM card to relay positioning data to another device.

Threats were delivered to his office, he said. On one occasion, Chinese “funeral money,” fake paper money sometimes burned by the graveside in a folk tradition, was sent to his office with a note, Kwok recalled. “‘You will be needing these very soon,’ the note read,” he said.

In November 2020, Kwok and three other pro-democracy lawmakers were ousted from the Legislative Council after China’s [legislative body] ruled that sitting members could be disqualified if deemed a threat to national security. That month, Kwok quietly slipped out of Hong Kong. He said articles in the pro-Beijing press, calling for his arrest and accusing him of being a foreign agent, also spurred him to leave

“After they disqualified me,” he said of the... move to oust him, “it was very clear the writing was on the wall.”

And now, the writing looks to be very much on the wall for Hong Kong's legal system as a whole, not just the city's remaining lawyers working to defend pro-democracy activists and other people who want justice to be served.  This even when they are themselves not behind bars -- unlike, say, Chow Hang-tung -- and defendants in cases rather than just the legal counsel -- again, like with Chow Hang-tung but also the likes of Martin Lee and Margaret Ng.

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