When China makes request to extradite people from Hong Kong, the HK court’s power is only to decide whether the request satisfy the requirement on paper. They can’t say hey your court is a kangaroo court and we can’t send people over. Nope. All HK court can do is just to mechanically check the requirements. Is it made from the highest court over there? Check. Is the offense’ penalty long enough? Check. Then OK here’s your guy.
Fundamental issue is nobody in the world trusts Chinese court. Do you know attorneys for human rights advocates could land in jail themselves? People are pressured to admit guilt all the time. For some reason everybody always feels sorry for what they did. And miraculously governments never lose a case. I guess they must have the best lawyers.
The one million people marching in HK are from the lower class. The upper class and wealthy people are on the side of the Chinese government. That’s why financial markets are not concerned at all about the protests. Business as usual.
No doubt that the Chinese court is not well respected now, especially for political dissenters. However, I suspect the one million protesters are not political dissidents at all. Most of them don’t even understand what this law change is about. They just use this excuse to release their frustrations with their life.
This law change was proposed due to the legal dilemma of a Hong Kong man killing his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan and he can only be punished for using his dead pregnant girlfriend’s credit card. It seems to be a reasonable change. Also this law change is a Hong Kong affair and it’s not even coming from China. Is the protest against Hong Kong government or Chinese government?
At the same time, China has extradition agreements with 40 other countries including France and Spain. Why is Hong Kong different?
Also I think you can let go of the Taiwan case. Taiwan has explicitly said they won’t make use of the new law. Plus, if it’s really about Taiwan how about make the law just applicable to Taiwan?
The fact is that this law change was proposed by Hong Kong lawmakers 20 years ago and it will be voted by Hong Long lawmakers this month. How can this be assigned to Xi? Hong Kong lawmakers must be Hong Kong citizens, right?
Hong Kong lawmakers must be elected by Hong Kong voters. This law was proposed 20 years ago by then Hong Kong lawmakers who might be elected before 1997.
Hong Kong’s Legco has complicated way of election. Not everybody is elected by direct election. Many belong to some career groups that have only a few hundred members. Beijing has de facto control over those people thru various means.
Anyway, I think Hong Kong lawmakers may shelve this extradition law change this month. They may need to study whether a majority of voters support it. Maybe it’s better to put this on ballot for the next election.
Yup, it was set up by the British colonial government. For the longest time there wasn’t even any elected members. Only a few years before handover to China did the British suddenly remember to put in some sham democracy.
He had limited knowledge but was able to derive good reasoning out of what he knew. You might know more facts but all you did was using them to come to the wrong conclusion.
Whether there was democracy or not is irrelevant. These protests are only using democracy as a pretext. The real reason of the protests is the lower class of Hong Kong not happy with being economically marginalized. They might think democracy would be their way out, but democracy is not going to help them. They need to work harder and smarter instead of protesting.
