tim's experiment

The Rule of Law, says the relevant government information sheet, is one of Hong Kong’s greatest strengths, and the cornerstone of Hong Kong’s success. “Any perceived threats to the integrity of Hong Kong’s legal system have been vigorously debated and analysed,” it says. OK. Analyse this.

Come with me, gentle reader, to a minor by-way in the great web which is the Hong Kong legal system. Chapter 547 of the Laws of Hong Kong (it’s a long book) is called the District Councils Ordinance. Strolling down it we pass the freshly modified and now quite long Clause 24, which includes the disqualification of members whose patriotic credentials have failed to pass muster.

And we pass Clause 27, which gives the Chief Executive power to decide the date of general elections, within limits.

And so we come to Clause 32, which concerns by-elections to fill vacancies, and goes like this: “If a vacancy arises in the office of an elected member, the Designated Officer must, by notice published in the Gazette, declare the existence of the vacancy within 21 days after becoming aware of the vacancy.”

The following clause states what happens next: (1)The Electoral Affairs Commission must, in accordance with regulations in force under the Electoral Affairs Commission Ordinance (Cap. 541), arrange for a by-election to be held in the following circumstances and not otherwise—(a)on the making of a declaration as to the existence of a vacancy in the membership of a District Council under section 32.

That is it, an admirably concise piece of legal draftsmanship. Notice what is there: the verb is “must”, not “may”. And what is not there: the procedure is completely automatic, with neither the Designated Officer nor the Electoral Affairs Commission having any discretion in the matter. There is no mention of, and no role for, the Chief Executive.

Now, recently resignations from District Councils have been falling like rain. More than half of the winners in the last general election to the councils have resigned, fled, or been jailed pending trial. You would think, having visited the law on the subject, that by-elections would be pending in droves. But this is not the case.

What has our leader to say on the subject? Miss Lam told one of her weekly press briefings that it would be “almost impossible” to hold all the by-elections before the administration’s term ends in June. Why the administration’s term is in any way relevant she did not say. No doubt the next administration will be equally adept at fixing elections.

Hong Kong, said Ms Lam, would be holding three sets of elections in the next ten months, for the Election Committee, the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive. “We do not feel there is room or time for another set of by-elections…”

As a practical excuse this is fairly pathetic. Elections to the Election Committee are not what they were: the electorate has shrunk by about 90 per cent under recent changes. Moreover elections by the Election Committee are not the government’s problem: it will have a Convenor to organise such things. Many of these elections are likely, given the new arrangements for screening candidates, to be uncontested.

The only ones in which most people have any chance of a vote is for 20 seats on the Legislative Council. But given the conditions attached to being a candidate it is quite likely that many of them will be uncontested, or if they are contested attract few voters.

In any case this is beside the point. The law is the law. Ms Lam has only herself to blame for the flood of resignations because it is a response to the government’s threat that any district councillor who is unseated for failure to take the loyalty oath, or disqualified from taking it, will be required to pay back all the pay and allowances he or she has received since the 2019 election.

As this implies a bill for about $1million per head it has prompted a lot of councillors to leave politics. Three district councils are said to be down to three members each.

Yet the threat is legally dubious and morally indefensible. Ms Lam said that the question would be handled “in accordance with law and there would be no leniency”. This suggests a distressing deficiency in the quality of the government’s legal advice. “Leniency” has nothing to do with it. It is not a criminal matter, simply an issue of whether the money was paid in error and whether, if it was, the government has the legal right to recover it.

The regime’s lawyers seem to have mixed things up here. When the first disqualifications were made from the Legislative Council it was on the basis that the oath of office which they had taken was not done properly for one reason or another, and consequently was invalid. So those unseated had never been councillors and the Government was entitled to its money back, although whether it actually recovered very much is doubtful.

The case of district councillors is quite different. They were not required to take an oath when they took office. The Ordinance does not say when a disqualification should be regarded as taking effect. In the rather similar case of an election petition to the High Court, though, it does say that if the petition is upheld then the removal of the erroneously seated councillor takes effect from the day of the decision. It is not backdated to the day of the election.

In any case using this as a threat to blackmail inconvenient councillors into resigning is a deplorable descent into Mafia-like behaviour. They were elected and took up office in good faith, following the law in force at the time. There is no suggestion that the money was mis-spent.

Well, except for a newspaper article by Regina Ip, which offered “Tales abound of actions and resolutions, bordering on the absurd, if not criminal, made by the district councils dominated by self-proclaimed democrats.”

Wonderful. Are we to be offered examples? Well, two district councillors of the fresh crop displayed in their office a notice saying “members of the blue camp and dogs not allowed”, which was tactless of them, but not an “action or resolution of a district council”.

Then we are offered another individual “offence”: one district councillor posted on her billboard a poster suggesting that China was responsible for spreading coronavirus to the world, not an extreme view in some places.

Last we have an incident in which a District Officer was besieged in her office by councillors incensed by one of her rulings, regrettable, no doubt, but not an official council activity.

Possibly sensing that this is a bit thin as a stick with which to beat 17 pan-democrat dominated district councils, Ms Ip then descended into generalities: “Since these bogus democrats took over, funding for popular community activities was axed, and local public works projects approved by their predecessors overturned. Yet funds were approved by several district councils to a pro-independence organisation, Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis, to organise competitions in “essay-writing” in Cantonese”.

This may have passed by the education in democracy which allows Ms Ip to discern “bogus democrats” but she should really get her head round the idea that newly elected councillors are entitled to the view that they know what activities are popular, and their predecessors’ views on the matter cannot be regarded as the last word. And if asked to offer examples of municipal depravity, Cantonese essay-writing competitions don’t really count, even if they are organised, as Ms Ip alleges, “to keep out mainland cultural influence.”

Anyway, there we are. Hong Kong cherishes the rule of law but the law means whatever Ms Lam finds convenient. The government, she said, would “seek other ways to gauge public opinion, such as the area committees appointed by the Home Affairs Department”. And “officials will approach issues through the work of district management committees.” In other words the government will listen only to people it has itself selected.

The Hong Kong government’s view of public opinion can be briefly put in a phrase once used of the old Hollywood studios: “if you’re not praising them they’re not listening.”

Like most people I am in two minds about the Olympics. It’s a commercial circus run for the television companies and administered by a corrupt bunch of elderly men. All the performers are professionals or hope that scoring a medal will enable them to become one.

The founding Baron thought athletics might function as a replacement for war, but the Olympics are more of a bloodless supplement to it. National flags are waved with abandon and some countries cheat furiously.

And yet… it is still a thrill to see someone who lives in the same town coming out in front of the world. The coverage tends to human interest stories rather than the actual details of the sports, and some of the resulting tales are genuinely inspiring. It is nice to see unfeigned joy on a face.

However the constant search for novelties leads to some strange places. Who, in the real world, takes three-a-side basketball seriously? It seems there is a trend towards the invention of “beach” variations on existing sports which will allow the organisers to insist on bikinis.

The new thing which really shocked me, though, was Street Skateboarding. It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Olympic Street Skateboarding? Many respectable members of the middle classes do not regard street skateboarding as a sport so much as a form of juvenile delinquency.

Skateboarding in a proper skateboarding park designed for the purpose offends nobody. In the street it is noisy, disturbing and dangerous. What are they trying to encourage?

So to Youtube, where I discovered that in the organised version they do not do it in the street. In the X Games, whatever they are, they have an extensive space like a normal skateboard park, with some street-like obstacles – ramps, stairs, railings – scattered about it. The performer does a succession of tricks on them.

For the Olympics the matter was simplified. There was one slope, decorated with a variety of stairs, bannisters, and such, on which each performer did one trick. This was repeated several times with, as you might imagine, scores for difficulty of item and smoothness in performance, as well as a swift exit from the medal running for anyone who falls flat on his or her face.

The so-called “women’s” event was in fact dominated by children. The winner, Momiji Nishiya, was 13. The silver medalist was the same age. The bronze medalist was a crone of 16. The skill and courage on display were remarkable, but…

Most of the tricks were variations on that Youtube staple in which the skateboarder leaps up, the skateboard mysteriously following the soles of his feet, and tries to slide down a railing by a flight of stairs. When attempted by the inexperienced this often leads to a nasty accident. The one in which the skateboard flies out of the picture and the skateboarder lands with one leg each side of the pole is particularly hard to watch.

And the question which then arises is, if you had a 13-year-old daughter, would you want her to be watching this? I assume for the Olympics they build the fake streetscape from some forgiving material but in real streets you are dealing with steel and concrete. Also in real streets there are cars.

Watching the very small ladies fly through the air, and occasionally crash land, I imagined orthopaedic surgeons all round the world rubbing their hands and upgrading the plans for their next BMW. We all want young people to be inspired to do more sports, but is this really a good choice?

In the Olympics they do wear crash helmets (which is more than you can say for the X games) but no other protection features. It seems skateboarders are not encouraged to such effete precautions as gloves, knee pads or elbow protection.

The result is predictable. If you look at the pictures of the triumphant winner which accompany this story you can see the visible part of what must be an extensive collection of scars.

Perhaps the risks are acceptable for the talented and properly taught. But if kids all over the world are going to be inspired to attempt this sort of thing in their back gardens, many of them are going to qualify … for the paralympics.

A feature of the government’s crackdown on dissent over the last two years has been the way in which previously respected – even admired – institutions were pressed into service and discredited in the eyes of the public by their efforts to display a becoming level of enthusiasm for reform, stability and one-party rule.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that this week it was the turn of the ICAC to be dragged into the mud. The Independent Commission Against Corruption was one of Hong Kong’s key institutions, offering the crucial hope that corruption had not only gone but would not be allowed to return.

It has always been hated by the police, because its first notable public act was to dismantle the Force’s corporate corruption racket and deprive police people of a large undocumented tax-free income. So now that so many senior officials are ex-policemen we should not, perhaps, have expected it to escape unscathed.

This week we were told that the ICAC had charged former prof Benny Tai and two other people with electoral malpractices. This concerned the Legislative Council elections held in … 2016.

This is a strange occurrence. The electoral law states that any candidate or group of voters dissatisfied with the conduct of an election can appeal to a High Court Judge. This must be done in the two months immediately following the election. Everyone involved in the election knew this.

Nobody complained. Indeed at the time nobody suggested that what Prof Tai and his two friends had done was illegal. We must not go into the details of the case against the trio but a conspicuous feature of it was the placing of newspaper advertisements, so the absence of complaints can hardly be put down to people not knowing what was going on.

Announcing the arrests the ICAC said it had acted following public complaints. This leaves us with three possibilities. The first is that a member of the public did in fact complain after the election but the ICAC took five years to investigate.

The second, hardly more credible, is that some random member of the public, browsing nostalgically in back numbers of the now-deceased Apple Daily, suddenly realised that a crime might have been committed and contacted the ICAC in a moment of public-spirited zeal.

The third is that the “member of the public” was a very senior member of the public who urged the ICAC to get with the programme and make its contribution to our government’s main current project, which is to throw as many legal bricks as possible at any conspicuous figure in what used too be known as the pan-democratic opposition.

The trouble with this is that if politics is influencing who gets prosecuted we must fear that it will soon influence who does not get prosecuted. And we have seen that movie before.

While I must urge readers not to read into this any intimation as to the innocence or guilt of the three people charged, which is not intended, there is no reason why we should not note, and comment on, the fact that this prosecution is outrageously late.

I have already written about this question of how long is a reasonable time for legal proceedings and do not propose to repeat the whole of that. Suffice to say that there are or should be limits, and by international standards they should be somewhat shorter than five years.

Of course if you murder your wife, bury her body in the back garden and nobody notices, you must not complain if you are prosecuted 20 years later when the new occupant of your house decides to build a swimming pool and discovers the remains. If on the other hand you decapitate her in the middle of Nathan Road and nothing happens for five years you are entitled to complain that the delay has seriously jeopardised your chances of finding witnesses who will substantiate your claim of self-defence.

Anyway this is not that sort of case. Prof Tai’s activities were widely publicised and discussed at the time. They were known to both the Department of Justice and the ICAC if they were awake. Even disgruntled DAB losers did not complain at the time that the law had been broken. What has changed?

Many years ago, when I was working in a local university and under some pressure to publish in more respectable places than newspapers, I wrote a long paper on a case in which the SAR Government prosecuted the Oriental Daily for the interesting and antiquated offence of “scandalising the court”.

This was back in 2001, but on the internet nothing dies. Readers who are interested in this judicial incident can still find the outcome of my efforts here.

The convenient thing about scandalising the court from my point of view was that cases are extremely rare, so I could read all of them. Incidentally I noticed that the Court of Appeal did not go to this much trouble, but no doubt they were busier than I was.

Scandalising the court consists of publishing abusive things about judges. Most of the cases concern allegations of bias – an old English case, for example, concerned the claim that an early campaigner for birth control could not expect a fair trial before a judge who happened to be a Catholic.

Modern writers have generally surmised that the offence was obsolete. People expect judges to be more thick-skinned these days and there is perhaps more appreciation of the usefulness of lay discussions of legal matters.

However the offence still crops up from time to time. I think the Oriental Daily case is still the most recent example, at least in Common Law countries. The consensus among the textbook authors was that it would only now be used to prosecute a writer who claimed or implied that a judge had been bribed.

This brings us to the doings of Mr Alex Yeung, who publishes his stuff on Youtube and similar places and is generally supportive of the blue ribbon end of the political spectrum.

His latest effort – report in English here – was a comment on the trial of seven men convicted of participating – on the white shirt side – in the Yuen Long incident of 2019. It included this fatal phrase: “I hope that the national security law (sic) and ICAC can investigate whether the judge had received any money.” Woops.

Only on rare occasions do I find myself in agreement with Ronnie Tong, but on this occasion it seemed to me that his assessment was incontrovertibly correct. He said that the comments were in contempt of court and that those who made them should be arrested.

The Department of Justice seemed to agree: “A spokesman for the DOJ said that “any person who is dissatisfied with court decisions may lodge appeals through the excising mechanism and should not criticise judicial officers abusively. Otherwise, it is against the law and the HKSAR Government will follow up on all the illegal acts.”

Really? Having ignored the law on contempt of court for so long the DoJ is finally going to have a go at one of its warm supporters?

The law on scandalising the court is perhaps an important protection for judges. Judges think so anyway. The law on reporting imminent proceedings is an important protection for defendants, which they are not getting. Law … sheep … wolves … need I say more?

We are in an official epidemic of the “so-called”. Readers with a taste for statistics will find the figures here. This article reports the results of an unusual academic pursuit, whose output for our purposes includes the fact that “so-called” appeared in no less than 80 Hong Kong government press releases and speech transcripts last year, compared with 30 the previous year and 18 the year before that.

The authors speculate that this may be the result of Hong Kong officials trying to demonstrate their loyalty to Beijing, where the use of “so-called” as a general term of abuse in official statements is well established. Ignorance is a possible alternative explanation.

The meaning of “so-called” is well established. It indicates doubt about the validity of the noun which is coming next. For example, someone who had doubts about the independence of the Independent Police Complaints Council might prefer to call it the “so-called Independent Police Complaints Council”.

This only works if there is an alternative. In the example above the writer implicitly suggests that “Non-independent Police Complaints Council” might be a better title.

Careful writers on Beijing-friendly publications will refer to Ms Tsai Ing-wen as the “so-called” president of Taiwan, to indicate their subscription to the view that Taiwan is a bogus country so Ms Tsai is not really a president. Indeed in a display of patriotic zeal they may prefer to dub her “the so-called president of the so-called Republic of China”. They would not, though refer to Taiwan as a “so-called island”. It is, after all, clearly an island. What else could you call it?

So what is going through the heads of Hong Kong officials complaining about the effects of “so-called sanctions.” Is there another word they would prefer? We realise of course that they do not approve of the sanctions, but why take issue with the label?

Similarly what is the beef with the “so-called business advisory” from the State Department about the perils of doing business in Hong Kong? Officials believe, we gather, that the perils of doing business here have not increased, as the State Department says they have. But whether justified or not, the advisory appears still to be an advisory – compliance is not compulsory – and it is presumably addressed to business people. So why “so-called”?

There is a danger that so-called will be sprinkled more or less haphazardly in official statements, rather as “alleged” used to be in police reporting.

In Legco the other day we had an official promising a survey of international practice in “false news” legislation which would include the “so-called” western democracies. And this raises the question of which part of the description he objects to. Is it the government’s view that the world’s more conspicuous democracies are not western? Would we prefer “Northern democracies”, as most of them are in the northern hemisphere?

Alternatively perhaps the revised official view is that they are not really democracies. In which case we have to wonder, who is? No doubt the name which pops unbidden into your head at this point will be as hilarious as the one which pops into mine, but let us not give offence.

Well residents must, as a police spokesman put it in a grossly prejudicial press conference about the series of arrests doomed to be known as the Subversive Sheep Book case, “see the facts clearly”.

In this they do not get much help from the police, where complaints are concerned. Consider their latest masterpiece, which concerned a freelance reporter, Ms Jasmine Leung, who was groped by a policeman during a social event in Mong Kok which she was covering. Details here.

The Complaints against Police Office sleuths reported on this event that after “a full investigation” the officer concerned could not be identified because the scene was chaotic and he was wearing a mask. This is so beside the point that it should really count as a lie.

The officer concerned could not be identified because in defiance of the law and the force’s own regulations he was not wearing a number and upon request he failed to produce his warrant card. No doubt the scene was chaotic and everyone concerned was wearing masks but citizens are not expected to rely on facial recognition to identify police people. 

Ms Leung asked another police person for help and was then pepper-sprayed. There was “no independent evidence“ of this event so it was “unsubstantiated”. Naturally she was unable to identify the pepper artist as well.

So, fellow residents, the clear facts are as follows: if you drive a car without the number plate which the law requires you will be prosecuted. If you are a policeman who fails to display the number which the law and the regulations require you can grope unsuspecting ladies or pepper spray them with impunity.

Anyone would think, as the so-called General Union of Speech Therapists might have put it, that there is one law for the sheep and another for the wolves.

So nostalgic to have a public row about senior civil servants hobnobbing with millionaires. Brings back happy memories of the Donald Tsang days.

I refer, of course, to the brouhaha over the discovery that the Deputy Secretary for Security, along with the heads of the Customs and Immigration services, participated in a hotpot dinner at which six other people were present, in flagrant violation of the social distancing rules.

This is something of a microscandal. Many of us have been in restaurants where more than four people were seated at a long table, with occasional sheets of perspex to divide them into notional groups of four. The three top officials were all hit with fixed penalty tickets costing $5,000. This is not a big deal for people on six-figure salaries but it’s enough.

I am also not too bothered by the revelation that the whole meal was paid for by a mainland property developer. It is a venerable principle in journalism that you should not accept anything which cannot be eaten, drunk or smoked in one sitting. The ensuing implication is that a hotpot dinner is OK as long as you don’t take a doggy bag home.

The entertaining part of all this is watching the slow-motion PR car crash caused by desperate attempts to explain the whole thing away.

First up was a nameless spokesperson for the Security Bureau, for which all three of our hotshot hot-potters work. “There were only three SAR officials present at the dinner,” we were told. “They were invited to attend it at a place which they were told by the host was a private premises, and therefore mistakenly believed that the venue fell outside of the regulation on group gathering.”

Just stop right there. The gathering, it is not disputed, took place in a Wanchai club. I think we can assume that the three officials were not blindfolded and led into the building so they had no idea what they were inside. Did they think the host lived in a Wanchai club?

This was a fairly limp excuse but at least it was an admission of error. The three also apologised, apparently, though only after they were exposed to the public; the incident actually took place in March.

“As the trio’s work requires frequent communication with different sectors in the community, the dinner that day was an ordinary social gathering,” the statement went on. But this is a resounding non sequitur. People whose work requires communication with different sections of the community do not team up with two senior mates and accept lavish invitations. The resulting get-togethers are not “normal social gatherings”.

There was a time, when I was a person with an important sounding title in the media business, when parts of the government – and the occasional Consul General – wished to communicate with me. They did not expect me to entertain them in Wanchai clubs, or anywhere else, for this purpose. The person who wants to communicate pays the bill.

In this case it appears the bill was rather big. A figure of $3,000 per head was mentioned.

Apparently referring to this, the spokesman said that the meal comprised “normal hotpot ingredients”. This offers us a choice of three possibilities. One is that the Security Bureau’s idea of a normal hot-pot is stunningly expensive. Another is that this particular Wanchai club is a rip-off. The third is that the bill was inflated by the need to pay for other – non-food – parts of the entertainment. Was there live music, “normal” cognac, topless waiting staff?

By the time Carrie Lam met the press on Tuesday the focus had rather shifted to the question of how normal the ingredients had been, because civil servants are barred by regulation from accepting “lavish” entertainment. 

There was no precise definition, she said, and the three hot-potters could not have known in advance what would be served. Indeed. When you are invited for an evening out with a mainland millionaire the possibilities are endless. Maybe just a beer and a sandwich?

Ms Lam then demonstrated her usual talent for changing the subject and answering a point which nobody had made: it would be a pity if civil servants were entirely forbidden to attend social events, she said.

On Wednesday, possibly sensing that this was not going down well, Secretary for Security Chris Tang tried a different line. The three officials, he said, had “sacrificed precious time with their families to do their jobs,” as RTHK put it. Goodness. I don’t suppose there was a dry eye in the house.

“As officials we have to keep in contact with different sectors, of different nature. It’s because when we’re formulating our strategies and our work, we have to know what the society is thinking,”

If this is their job, I cannot help thinking, some further thought needs to be given to the methodology employed. I cannot think of a government which shows less sign of having the slightest idea what “the society is thinking”. This may be, of course, because so much of the data on this important topic is gathered at boozy gatherings with mainland millionaires. 

What society is thinking about this case, I suspect, is that if you civil service heavies want to go out on the town with rich outsiders, fill your boots. But don’t come back afterwards and tell us that you were beavering away on our behalf and sacrificing precious time with your families. Ignorance was not a very good excuse but bullshit is worse.

The one sad thing about dogs, as we all discover sooner or later, is that they do not live as long as we do. At some point, no matter how careful you are about fleas, worms and other hazards, you have to say goodbye.

This often involves the painful decision that your beloved mutt needs to be helped on his way. As long ago as the 19th century, according to Axel Munthe (The Story of San Michele – a good book though somewhat downranked by current critics) it was already customary to get your vet to do this for you.

Munthe is rather critical of the euthanasia methods then current, and suggests instead that you should take your elderly dog for a walk in the park with a favourite bone … and a revolver. What you are supposed to do with the resulting dead dog he does not say. But in those days dead horses, abandoned where they had dropped in the street, were a serious municipal waste problem. So perhaps the odd canine corpse would pass unnoticed.

The first parental pooch I remember was a Dalmatian called Lucy. When, I presume, she died my brother and I were as was customary in those days considered too young for the awful truth. We were told she had emigrated to the Isle of Man. I swallowed this whole.

In Hong Kong there is a curious wrinkle. Vets who do not usually make house calls – at least for small animals – will volunteer to do the Last Injection in your home. I suppose this is preferred to having customers leaving the office, distraught and dogless, in front of the other clients.

Our last departure was a bit more elaborate, because the dog, Kiki, had been in and out of the City U dog hospital (or Veterinary Medical Centre, in its official terminology) for months. Sensing that things had taken a turn for the worse we had checked her in again and she stayed overnight in the Intensive Care Unit. The City U centre is the Adventist Hospital of Dogs – it is very well equipped and quite expensive.

The next morning I was awoken by a call from the ICU saying that things had not gone well and we should hurry to the bedside. By the time we got to the ICU it was clear that there was no hope. Vital signs were all over the place and it was time to end the suffering. To which we agreed.

We were then passed on to a lady I had not met before who seemed to be the Soon-to-be-bereaved-Parent-Whisperer. She explained the procedure and we were ushered into a delicately named “Family Room”, whose purpose was rather given away by a copious supply of tissues and a little pile of leaflets from pet cremation services.

Your dog is wheeled in and transferred to a small shelf. She is already fitted with the tube in her leg through which the drugs will be administered, rather along the lines of American capital punishment by lethal injection. We were then supposed to have ten minutes together before the send-off, but after five minutes Kiki disrupted this plan by dying without medical assistance.

So we had a brief medical visit to confirm that no further help was required, the tube was removed and Kiki was rearranged in a tactfully comfortable-looking position. And after some farewell looks you sort out the cremation service, tidy up the financial arrangements and go home, feeling awful and wondering if there was something else you could have done.

Two days later a little surprise: there appeared in the mail a card, with a hand-written message of consolation, signed by the various people at the dog hospital who had worked on Kiki. I do not know if they do this for all their deceased clients or Kiki had accumulated a fan club during her numerous visits. Either way it was a nice gesture and I appreciated it. 

I don’t know how this affects other dog owners but I always spend a day or two thinking I never want to risk having to go through the emotional upheaval of losing a furry friend again. Then you gradually notice that there is a dog-shaped hole in your life and start thinking about filling it.

We lasted a week. The new dog is an affectionate mongrel called Lemon.

Some of our imperial rulers seem to have overlooked a rather important point about Hong Kong’s future role.

We all understand that we have now abandoned the ambition to be “Asia’s World City”, a competitor for New York and London as a magnet for creative and enterprising individuals from all over the world, offering a lively, inviting and above all free environment for residents and visitors.

Now we are apparently going to be more specialised. We shall concentrate on being an international financial centre, which has the twin advantages of being easily achieved, because we are pretty much there already, and fulfilling our most important function in the eyes of Beijing bigwigs, which is to provide a conduit through which they can get their swag out of reach of the Party’s financial sleuths.

It is true that an international financial centre does not need to be famous for its observation of human rights and other civic furbelows. International finance is driven by greed, so the only requirement for such a centre is the presence of large amounts of money which financiers can hope to shake off the tree.

It may be that the government is a bit on the unsavoury side. It may execute adulterers in public, cut the hands off thieves, punish rape victims for not choosing death before dishonour, shut its eyes to honour killings, jail its critics, cheat in its elections and have inconvenient journalists dismembered in overseas embassies.

This will not discourage the international finance people, as long as there is money there in large quantities. Avarice trumps humanitarian considerations every time.

Still, there are some requirements for a financial centre. The first one is a basic recognition that the owner of money has the right to do what he likes with it, and that contracts will be honoured and if necessary enforced. Without this important bit of infrastructure the financial fish will swim elsewhere. Money is mobile, and will migrate to where it is appreciated.

There have been several signs recently that this important and indeed fundamental requirement is being forgotten.

One was a “forum” the other day at which several mainland performers stressed the importance of the judiciary getting on-side, as it were, with the Party’s preferences. The head of Beijing’s national security office in Hong Kong, for example, said that “judiciary staff” had the obligation to safeguard national security. 

Yang Wanming, who is the vice president of the supreme people’s court, called for more cooperation and exchanges so that between the mainland and Hong Kong there would not be “a big discrepancy in terms of legal understanding”.

But there is a big discrepancy in terms of legal understanding. If Hong Kong judges are expected to support government policies and operate on the same lines as their mainland counterparts we will clearly no longer be able to advertise an independent judiciary, a line which is already straining some people’s credulity.

If judges are not allowed to handle national security cases fairly and in accordance with legal principles, then the more finicky ones will depart the bench, leaving it populated with time-servers who are willing to do the Party’s bidding and serve its perceived interests, in political and non-political cases alike.

Then we have the idea which, according to The Standard last week, is “gaining traction”, and this is that civil servants’ pensions should be made conditional on good behaviour. Those who criticise the government, suggested a union official, should be deprived of the pension.

This idea was warmly welcomed by the chairman of the Senior Government Officers Association. The chairman, Peter Wong Hyo, suggested that the annual declaration required of civil servants should be amended to include a version of the oath to observe the national security law.

The legal implications of this seem to have passed Mr Wong by. The payment of the pension is a contractual obligation dating from the time when the pensioner was appointed. This is why it is still paid to those retired civil servants who were taken on before the government decided that all future recruits should be thrown to the MPF sharks.

The current “annual declaration” has nothing to do with the civil servants’ conduct or political activities. It merely confirms that he or she is still alive. Making the payment of the pension conditional on some definition of “good behaviour” would be a flagrant violation of the contracts of the pensioners concerned.    

Mr Wong, who clearly has a vivid imagination, said that introducing such a requirement would not violate freedom of speech because “Hongkongers still enjoy freedom of speech under the National Security Law”.

Well this is just an idea which, traction or no traction, may come to nothing. Our next example is already in action.

Hongkongers who migrate to the UK, a perfectly legal thing to do, are being refused access to their accumulated MPF funds. Details here. This is a clear breach of the rules. You are entitled to withdraw your MPF funds if you move permanently out of the territory … in any direction.

The problem is that many of those moving to the UK do so under the BNO passport scheme, as this is the cheapest and easiest route. The Hong Kong and China governments, in a fit of pique over the UK’s offer to admit BNO holders to citizenship, refuses to recognise the BNO passport as an identity or travel document.

But, as David Webb was first to point out, this is not really relevant. The governments of China and its colonies have a perfect right to recognise or not recognise any document for the purposes of interactions with their border controls or policemen. The question whether someone has permanently moved overseas, on the other hand, is a factual matter, and the mover has a perfect right, if asked if he has the right of abode in another country, to produce a BNO passport, which for these purposes means whatever the UK government decides it means.

It seems that examples are piling up of people who were told that because their migrant status in the UK was embodied in a BNO they would not be able to withdraw their MPF funds. Some of them now wonder if, even more scandalously, they might not be able to do so when reaching the age of 65. This just will not do. The funds which people have deposited in the MPF are still their funds. They have a right to withdraw them under stipulated circumstances, which include permanent departure from Hongkong.

The odd wrinkle in this is that the refusal does not come from the Hongkong government, it comes from the international financial firm which runs the fund which the MPF owner has chosen for his savings. HSBC, Manulife and AIA have been mentioned, though it appears that they are following instructions from the MPF Authority.

So far none of the people who were refused their money has sued the company concerned. This state of affairs will not last for ever. True, without access to their MPF funds many of them are very short of money and the law is an expensive pursuit. But in the UK, unlike Hongkong, it is not an offence to pay someone else’s legal expenses. So sooner or later someone will sue.

The most likely outcome, I suppose, is that he or she will win. But even if the finance firm wins, it will be a PR catastrophe on the scale of the MacDonalds libel case. The idea that people deposited their savings with one of these financial mammoths and then were told they could not get them back will go down very badly with potential customers elsewhere.

The fact is that morally, and probably legally as well, these people are being robbed at the behest of the Hong Kong government via the MPF Authority. This means that if your wealth is managed in Hong Kong it is subject to confiscation at any time without the slightest legal pretext.

Some months ago I asked the gentleman who manages my savings on my behalf if any of the investments concerned were domiciled in Hong Kong. He assured me that they were not. I imagine this is going to become a rather popular question.

A financial centre depends on trust, a commodity which is now being squandered.

Why, asked one of my colleagues, do you not write about politics any more? I had not noticed this, but it is true. The increasing frequency of legal comments is partly due to the disappearance of politics. There is no shortage of legal nonsense; the political nonsense has gone underground.

The proceedings of the Legislative Council have become a mere formality. Officials announce what they have already announced in a recent press conference. There is no debate, no criticism. Some of the more odious pro-government mediocrities take the chance to appear more royalist then the King by calling for something outrageous. Nobody cares; nobody listens.

The situation outside the council is not much better. Critical voices have been jailed or intimidated. Commentators are inhibited by the vagueness of the crimes now being discovered under the national security legislation and the newly exhumed sedition section of the Crimes Ordinance.

Discussion of policy seems pointless because it is no longer clear who decides anything, and on important matters it appears that the decisions are not made by Hong Kong officials or indeed in Hong Kong at all. Writers are of course used to being ignored. But it seems there is no longer a public conversation in which you can join. So why bother?

Meanwhile the deterioration in the legal situation has one saving grace for scribes with itchy pens: it is all still public.

Let us start our tour of the morgue with a visit to the court of magistrate Arthur Lam Hei-wei, presiding over a case in which a member of the public was accused of assaulting a policeman. The defence was, among other things, that the defendant did not know the alleged victim was a cop. Details here.

The interesting public point is Mr Lam’s explanation for his verdict of guilty: “Magistrate Arthur Lam Hei-wei said he was not convinced Bickett did not know Yu was a police officer”. And so another legal landmark goes down the drain.

It is not, in the old tradition, up to the defendant in a criminal case to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. If the defence is that the defendant did not know something, then it is up to the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he did. If magistrate Lam had any doubts on this point then the defence was entitled to the benefit of them, and an acquittal.

The defendant will no doubt appeal (he is a lawyer) but in the meantime was remanded in custody. This will give him some peaceful days to ponder the question which this case raises: was Mr Lam having an off-day, or is it now a general rule that, in magistrates courts at least, the defendant is presumed to be guilty?

For a more intricate and technical problem we can turn to the case of Mr Tong Ying-kit, who is accused of driving a motorcycle while flying a flag saying “Free Hong Kong, revolution of our times”, or words to that effect. He eventually collided with three policemen.

Of course Mr Tong’s guilt or innocence is entirely a matter for the jury – I beg your pardon for the three selected national security judges – hearing the case. The curious point about the prosecution’s case is the way they approached an undoubted problem: what exactly does “free Hong Kong, revolution of our times” mean?

The meaning of this term has already been announced by the Chief Executive and sundry persons among her minions and the law and order industry. But their opinions are not evidence. The Liaison Office has also condemned the phrase as “implying secession”. But you can’t call them as a witness either.

So it appears, judging by the lavish stream of quotations in the prosecutor’s opening address, that the prosecution is going to rely on expert testimony from Associate Professor Lau Chi-pang, who plies the Powerpoint in the History Department at Lingnan University.

And the thing which bothers me about this arrangement is this: can we regard Professor Lau as – in the legal meaning of the term – an expert?

To start with he is only an Associate Prof, a perfectly respectable rank whose modest altitude can be inferred from the fact that I used to be one. Also he is a historian. There is nothing about the study of history (in which I also have a degree) which qualifies a historian to pronounce with authority on the meaning of words in contemporary politics.

The historian may have an opinion, a well-informed opinion even, but it is no better than that of any diligent newspaper reader of normal intelligence.

The academic study of the meaning of words is conducted by linguists and philologists. If the prosecution could not find a friendly one to perform on its behalf this could be because to the learned eye the meaning of words like “free” and “revolution” is always nebulous and subjective. Words do not have “official” meanings outside of Stalinist states.

It appears also that Prof Chau is not only not an expert, but also not an independent expert. He has been a member of numerous bodies to which the government appoints its friends and supporters. He is a Justice of the Peace, which in Hong Kong is a duty-free honorific to reward faithful “small horses”, and the holder of a Bronze Bauhinia Star, of which you could say much the same.

He has been an invited member of the Heung Yee Kuk, which suggests an allegiance not so much to blue ribbons as to white tee-shirts. He is also a non-executive director of a mainland marble mining company.

Clearly Prof Lau is a respectable pillar of the community and the man to turn to if you want learned advice on the origins of local place names. As an authority on what Mr Tong intended by “Free Hong Kong, revolution of our times”, though, he leaves much to be desired.

If the Department of Justice cannot recruit a real expert then fishing a bogus one out of the government’s list of “friends who can be trusted” is not a good look.

No politically interesting event in Hong Kong is complete without an outburst of venomous fantasies from CY Leung, and the latest assault on Apple Daily was no exception.

It is difficult to know what metaphor suits Mr Leung. When he looks in the mirror, I suspect, he sees a De Gaulle-like figure waiting in Colombey-les-deux-Peak-palaces for the call of destiny. For the Liaison Office, as least in its more soothing moments, he is the mad aunt in the attic who one hopes will not come downstairs while the vicar is visiting.

For many Hong Kong people he is that buoyant bit you sometimes see floating in your toilet after you have flushed it. After one term of office Mr Leung’s brand was too toxic even for his mainland handlers, but hope springs eternal in the patriotic breast. After all, so much of the political opposition has been silenced…

When four Apple Daily executives were arrested there was, of course, a chorus of approval from the usual people. However as reported, at least, they carefully avoided comments on the merits of the individual case. We did not perhaps need to be reminded that the National Security Law applies to everyone, or that freedom of the press does not allow media to break the law. But these general comments are not actually prejudicial to the upcoming trial.

No such inhibitions hampered the muse of Mr Leung, who cheerily trumpeted on Facebook the view that Apple Daily was “the shame of Hong Kong” and “the shame of the journalism industry around the world”. Well it is not for me to speak for Hong Kong, but I will venture a wild guess that the journalism industry around the world does not wish a poisonous political failure to speak for it, and is very far from regarding Apple Daily as a source of shame.

Mr Leung proceeded to perpetrate an obvious error: “Calling on other countries to impose sanctions on their own country is regarded as treason all around the world.” No it isn’t. The meaning of treason varies from place to place, but is usually reserved for two crimes: 

Calling on other countries to impose sanctions appears on nobody’s list, and indeed in countries enjoying freedom of speech it would be surprising if it did. I have no doubt that in the US and Europe people are defending China’s retaliatory sanctions against American and European organisations and individuals as entirely justified. And these people are not being arrested.

Mr Leung went on to ask darkly “Do you know the penalty for treason?” Readers are evidently expected to infer that the penalty for treason is death, so those accused in Hong Kong who are merely being subjected to imprisonment without trial should consider themselves lucky. But this is far from true. Countries which have abandoned capital punishment for other purposes have abandoned it for treason as well, preferring a maximum of life imprisonment.

That is just the maximum of course. Two Norwegian teenagers who committed treason by throwing a cake at the King were subjected to small fines.

It is almost a relief when Mr Leung reverts to the usual platitudes: nobody is above the law, and press freedom does not confer immunity. Well of course we would like to think that nobody is above the law, but recent events have rather suggested that some people and newspapers are in fact less submerged by the law than others.

I am frankly getting fed up with this line that press freedom does not mean you are above the law. Of course it doesn’t. Nobody in Hong Kong has suggested at any time that press freedom required media organisations to be above the law.

The recognition of this important principle, though, does not mean that any law which the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office can dream up will not be a threat to press freedom. Some laws are compatible with press freedom and some are not.

It is quite clear that just as the laws governing politics and government are being used to promote a particular result, some parts of the national security legislation are being used to remodel the media along lines desired by our imperial rulers.

I would not wish it to be said, when they come for me, that I was silent when other people were being muzzled. The campaign against Apple Daily is clearly motivated by the desire to put a dissenting voice out of business. The law is merely a means to a political end, deployed by a regime which likes to praise the rule of law but scorns to practice it.

The Liaison Office has repeatedly said “Hong Kong is a city under the rule of law and everyone is equal before the law.” 

Methinks, as the Queen said, the lady doth protest too much