tim's experiment

Reactions to the end of the Jimmy Lai fraud case were mostly predictable but eventually, in one case, surprisingly honest.

Mr Lai had earlier been convicted of fraud because a small part of the factory building he had leased was, in violation of the lease conditions, used as the office of the company which provided secretarial services to the firms in his Apple Daily group.

This was in itself a somewhat surprising event. Factory spaces in Hong Kong are routinely used for other purposes; in Fotan where I live there are factory spaces being used for shops, offices, restaurants, artists’ studios and in a few cases homes. This is generally regarded as a private matter between the landlord and his tenant.

Little was made of this oddity in local media because of the curious state of the law on contempt of court these days. You can imply that someone is guilty with impunity and the pro-government outlets do it all the time. Implying innocence is more dangerous so most of us give it a miss.

The passing of sentence ends the sub judice period so we can all now – at least in theory – say what we like.

Mr Lai’s legal team complained that the charges were “spurious” and part of a campaign of “lawfare” targetting Mr Lai for his leading role in protests and campaigns for democracy.

A local blogger pointed out that shorter sentences had recently been imposed on miscreants convicted of attempted murder in one case, and child abuse in another.

The US State Department said the sentence – five years and nine months – was “immoderate and grossly unjust”, and called for the authorities to respect freedom of expression in Hong Kong.

To the usual complaints, the usual reply. A Hong Kong government spokesman dubbed the State Department’s complaint “absurd”, and said it “disregarded the facts”. It was a “malicious slander on Hong Kong’s judicial system”

The spokesperson went on to say that Mr Lai had exercised his defence rights, and the court had passed sentence independently, based on facts and evidence after an open trial. Reasons for the sentence were contained in the publicly available judgement. He concluded that “a fraud case should not be tied with political considerations”.

So far so normal. An alert reporter could have written the whole controversy in advance. But the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong had apparently not been in the loop when the “line to take” was decided.

A spokesman said that residents’ rights were protected by the rule of law, but “such rights are not a ‘free pass’ to criminal acts, which include opposing China and disrupting the city.”

This seems to confirm what many of us already suspected. Mr Lai was not, at least in this case, charged with anything like opposing China or disrupting the city. But in the Foreign Ministry’s view, apparently, anyone who is suspected of such a thing forfeits all rights, including the right not to be charged with spurious offences and condemned to disproportionate sentences upon conviction.

So it was political after all? What a malicious slander of Hong Kong’s judicial system!