Moving the goalposts

The High Court refuses Chow Hang-tung’s application to call overseas witnesses to give evidence remotely in her trial. Normally, judges could permit such a request, but an amendment made earlier this year to the Criminal Procedure Ordinance bars such testimony in national security cases. She is accused of ‘inciting subversion of state power’ as an organizer of the Tiananmen vigils…

The activist … said she suspected that the authorities had enacted the new rule specifically to prevent her from being able to call overseas witnesses in her trial.

Chow said she first raised the matter of wanting to call on overseas witnesses to testify in mid-January, around two weeks before public consultation documents outlining the draft of the proposed law were published.

A reference to a proposed amendment regarding testifying in trials virtually was only made in early March, when the draft of the new national security law was tabled to the Legislative Council, she said.

The “reasonable inference” is that before knowing of Chow’s intention, the authorities had no plan to make that amendment, and upon learning of it did not have time to include it in the consultation papers, Chow said.

…Chow told the court she intended to summon five people to testify: American political science professor Larry Diamond; the artist behind a well-known Tiananmen crackdown statue Jens Galshiot; and Chinese [Tiananmen-era] activists Fang Zheng, Zhou Fengsuo, Wu’erkaixi. Except for Diamond, all had been denied entry to Hong Kong before, she said.

From a thread by Xinqi Su… 

Chow, defending in person, said the new ban created unjustified differentiated treatments between parties in nat sec trials and parties in non-nat sec trials. “This legislation means the court is not trusted to be able to come to appropriate decisions in national security cases. That is why its discretion must be completely taken away,” Chow said. 

She added that “the greatest tempering (of witnesses) comes from here instead of overseas. Due to the local political environment, witnesses here cannot feel safe and free to testify , and they even fear the act of testifying per se can beget oppression, whereas overseas witnesses can tell their experiences and opinions without worries”.

The authorities would obviously not welcome the four who are apparently barred from Hong Kong appearing in a live broadcast in a court (it would probably be asking for trouble to have any of them appear online in a local conference or seminar). And pro-government figure Regina Ip is probably also relieved that the fifth, Larry Diamond, cannot appear: he was her supervisor when she did an advanced degree at Stanford back in the 2000s, and, as an expert witness, would most likely embarrass her by contradicting many of her more recent ‘patriotic’ positions on Hong Kong politics.

We can only guess at what sort of testimony supporting Chow Hang-tung the court – and public – will now never hear.