Chow Hang-tung (to her surprise) wins her appeal against conviction for ‘inciting’ others to take part in an illegal assembly – last year’s Tiananmen vigil. Expect the Department of Justice to blow taxpayers’ money trying to get that reversed.
Quick summary of the judge’s reasoning. She concluded that the HK Police ban on the vigil was not lawful. Expect a sorely vexed Security Bureau.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xS8t4J3_Dc
More on what the decision means here.
Meanwhile, a teenager gets up to three years in a training centre for such sins as rewriting lyrics to the national anthem.
Australian Financial Review on the broader ramifications of the decline of Hong Kong’s legal system…
Lawyers … warn the effectiveness of Hong Kong’s legal system has already been undermined because it is becoming increasingly difficult to get quality judges to join the bench.
“The bigger concern is what sort of quality of legal reasoning and commercial justice you are going to be getting generally under a system where your best commercial lawyer brains don’t want to become judges. And having quality commercial law is a big thing for a market like Hong Kong,” says Kevin Yam, a former Hong Kong lawyer who moved to Melbourne earlier this year.
Yam expands on his comments here. (And, on cue, the latest judicial appointments.)
After insisting that ‘interpretation’ is the only way to go, pro-Beijing figures suggest that the Chinese government might not deliver one, and that local measures could instead be used to bar Jimmy Lai from having a foreign lawyer. This assumes that CE John Lee ‘requested’ an interpretation of his own volition rather than at Beijing’s prompting, which sounds unlikely. Perhaps Mainland officials have since decided that other ways to bar foreign lawyers from NatSec trials would look better.
Health Secretary Lo Chung-mau calls on people not to uninstall LeaveHomeSafe from their phones, saying ‘there is more to the app than just scanning QR codes’. Almost sounds like his family secretly owns 50% of the thing, and they’ve been raking in millions in royalties every week. Presumably the mass-deletion of LHS is something of a loss of face.
And how’s this for great timing? Following authorization of virtual-asset ETFs, Hong Kong investors can now buy BitCoin and Ethereum futures funds – just as the whole crypto fake-money fantasy scam crumbles.
‘there is more to the app than just scanning QR codes’. Indeed, and this is why so many folk want rid of it.
Judge Barnes was born in 1952, so presumably will retire soon as I believe 70 is the final cut for High Court. May be a factor in the formulation of her reasonable judgment.
Don’t laugh about crypto, its performance is on par with HSTECH index.
“Don’t laugh about the obvious financial scam, its performance is on par with another obvious financial scam.”