It’s Euskara Friday!

An interesting scoop from Transit Jam on lousy security measures at the HK-Zhuhai bridge border crossing…

Contractors at the “restricted area” bridging the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao use an elaborate system of discarded or outdated passes and messaging codewords to move dozens of people invisibly around the border zones every day, according to a whistleblower who worked at the border.

Globe and Mail (paywalled) editorial titled ‘Hong Kong has courts, but no justice’…

In explaining his decision to resign, Mr. Sumption wrote that Hong Kong is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and that the rule of law in the territory has been “profoundly compromised” under the security law.

That was nine weeks ago. This week, Hong Kong took yet another step toward the totalitarian, with the territory’s Court of Final Appeal unanimously upholding the conviction of billionaire Jimmy Lai on organizing and participating in an unauthorized assembly, when pro-democracy protests roiled Hong Kong in the summer of 2019.

…seven foreign judges still sit on the Court of Final Appeal, including David Neuberger, the former president of Britain’s Supreme Court. He was part of the unanimous ruling against Mr. Lai.

And, in a you-can’t-make-this-up touch, Mr. Neuberger is also the chair of a panel of legal experts on media freedom for the Media Freedom Coalition, made up of 51 countries, including Canada.

One immediate consequence of the Court of Final Appeal’s decision on Mr. Lai should be for Canada and the other member countries of the Media Freedom Coalition to present Mr. Neuberger with a choice. He can either continue to be a fig leaf for Beijing’s repression, or he can be an adviser on media freedom. The two are fundamentally at odds.

More broadly, the other foreign non-permanent judges on the Court of Final Appeal need to follow Mr. Sumption’s example and resign. A resignation en masse would tell the world that Beijing has co-opted the legal system in Hong Kong and that courts in the territory are, for any politically tinged matter, an extension of the Communist Party.

Thanks to Mainland immigration, Hong Kong is barely keeping its population up, with a 0.1% year-on-year fall just reported, A Twitter thread looks at some underlying demographics…

By ‘international’ media – as in coverage of Hong Kong – we tend to mean ‘Anglo’. For a change, here’s a story on the ‘silent invasion’ of the city – in Basque…

Hori hala, Patrick Kar-wai Poon akademiko eta kazetaria bat dator Hong Kongeko hainbat bizilagunen ustearekin; hau da, uste du agintariak eginahalean ari direla biztanle liberalagoak kontinentetik etorritakoekin ordezkatzeko: «Txinako Gobernuak Hong Kongeko kultura urardotu gogo du, Txinako gero eta jende gehiago bulkatuz…

Spot the non-Indo-European language. Google translate does a pretty good job, it seems…

However, the academic and journalist Patrick Kar-wai Poon agrees with the belief of many residents of Hong Kong; in other words, he believes that the authorities are trying to replace the more liberal population with those from the mainland: “The Chinese government wants to destroy the culture of Hong Kong, pushing more and more Chinese people to take over Hong Kong”, he said. “In exchange for attracting people, the Hong Kong Government itself implements policies that make it increasingly dependent on the mainland economy…

How well would the wolf-warrior tone of Hong Kong’s press releases translate into Basque? Here’s a milder one on National Ecology Day 2024 Launching Ceremony cum Symposium.

If officials put together an ‘ejaculate and festive citrus fruit’ themed event, they could call it the ‘Cum cum Cumquat Symposium’.