Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘news’

Yet another Olympics but some new events: rows over gender and sex offenders

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

There was a woman in Penfold Park the other day wearing a tee-shirt displaying the words “Another fucking Olympic games”. We must bear in mind, of course, that she may not have read it carefully before buying it, of if she did, did not understand the message or recognise the F-word.

Still, this is not a unique sentiment. It is a feature of the great international sportfests that the number of people who travel to the site of the event in the hope of watching the proceedings is more or less matched by the number of people who take a holiday from their homes to avoid the visiting crowds.

It would perhaps not be fair to apply this crudely to the current Olympics in Paris, because Paris notoriously empties itself of locals on July 14 (when the school term finishes) and is generally inhabited only by people who cater for visitors until sometime around the end of August.

Still, it must be recognised that the Olympics are something which people can have enough of. My dim memories of media coverage go back to the Melbourne summer games in 1956. Looking at the list I do not seem to have registered the winter versions at all.

There is a certain rhythm to these things. When the host city is chosen there is a whiff of scandal. Then there are the first of the pained noises about the budget which will continue until well after the games, because the bid budget always turns out to have been imaginative when it hits reality.

In the run-up to the great event there are some cliff-hanging stories around the possibility that some vital piece of infrastructure will not be ready in time. Then there are arguments in most countries about selection. Hong Kong’s version of these used to concern some athlete who was eligible but did not – um – look Chinese and was not selected. We seem to have outgrown this particular problem. There continues, on the other hand, to be subdued muttering about the number of Hong Kong Olympians who moved to the SAR after narrowly missing inclusion in the China team.

During the games there will be the usual dust-ups about refereeing, cheating, tactless winners and tactless losers, surreptitious efforts to help the home team, and so on. These will be off-set by magical moments of sportsmanship and joy. On the whole most of the media people and all of the officials will conclude that the games were a success, whatever that means, except for Munich 1972, marred by a massacre.

The host city will then be left to pick up the bill, which can be enormous – Montreal (1976) took decades to pay off its Olympic debts. Los Angeles (1984) seems to have been unique in actually showing a profit. There is also the question whether all the facilities specially built will, as the boosters predict, be useful afterwards. Here also outcomes vary. London (2012) seems to have found a use for all its Olympic erections; Athens (2004) still has weed-infested sports sites which were never used again.

Social scientists have determined that the economic benefits of hosting the games are overstated and probably non-existent, while they do give a lot of harmless pleasure to the population of the host city while they last. This is a difficult attraction to sell politically and bids to host have become sparse.

The current games, I notice, have already produced two rows of a kind to which we were not treated in the 20th century. The first concerns woman boxers who used to be men.

This did not come up in the old days, partly no doubt because there were no woman boxers. I recall some carefully phrased expressions of suspicion about well-built Russian women in the throwing events. The two boxers at the centre of the current row were excluded from the last Olympics. But the organising body for Olympic boxing was changed after a refereeing scandal and the new one revised the rules.

I confess to being non-plussed by the moral issues involved. It is an important moral principle that all people should be treated the same, and if they wish to be women they should be allowed to be women. On the other hand it is also an important principle that athletic contestants should be fairly matched, and in some sports, including boxing, being a man for the first 15 or 20 years of your life apparently confers a big advantage.

My Solomonic solution would be to ban boxing altogether as being a depraved pursuit unfit for decent human beings, who ought to be repelled by the idea of beating someone else unconscious. But that is not going to happen.

The other very 21st century contribution is the row over the Dutch volley ball player – unashamedly male – who was convicted some years ago, when he was 19, of having sex with a 12-year-old girl.

In England, where he did it – they met on-line, of course – this is treated as rape, and he was accordingly sentenced to several years in jail. After some months, though, he was returned to Holland, where consensual sex with under-age partners is, though still illegal, regarded less seriously. So he was released soon after.

The question which then arose from several directions was whether it was acceptable for such a person to be in an Olympic team. The Dutch view is that the man concerned has expressed remorse, served his time, recognised the error of his ways and is entitled to be treated like any other citizen who is good at volleyball.

The contrary view is that the man is a paedophile and should be shunned athletically, presumably for the rest of his life, as an inappropriate role model for young people who may regard Olympians as examples of behaviour to be emulated. Objectors also claim that having him on the court, pitch or whatever is upsetting for victims of sex crimes generally and his victim in particular

I confess to finding it easier to find a side to agree with in this one. Criminals who have done their time and expressed a decent level of reform and regret are entitled to be treated as ordinary members of society. If we are to bar convicted sex offenders from the Olympics what happens when some team turns out to include a bank robber, a mugger, a retired member of Islamic State or a fencer who honed his sword skills by beheading adulterous women in Saudi Arabia?

Note that the latter competitor will not have been jailed. A global sporting festival will include people from a variety of different backgrounds and legal regimes. Attitudes to sex are particularly fraught with geographical variations. The idea that some sex offenders should be treated to life-time ostracism is a Western thing.

As for the argument that this is all unfair to victims, I discern a whiff of hypocrisy. The fact is that there is a fairly small following for three-a-side volleyball, and the Dutch team is not particularly prominent. The player concerned has been in the international side since 2017. Nobody would have noticed his inclusion if nobody had made a fuss about it.

Update: There is an error in this piece. I supposed, and wrote, that the two boxers in a row over their hormone levels were people who had been born as males and transitioned to female. This is not the case. Both the women concerned were recognised and registered as female at birth and have gone through the rest of their lives as women. Their elevated testosterone levels are a result of a rare medical condition. The dilemma remains the same: does the effect of this produce so much unfairness, or danger, that the two athletes should be barred from competition? But opinions about the merits or otherwise of gender transition are nothing to do with it. Thoughtful piece in the Guardian here.

Read Full Post »

Where the law rules, and where it doesn’t

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 6, 2024| 1 Comment »

One of the strange things about the much-cited rule of law in Hong Kong is the way it swiftly dissipates as you move north from the Lion Rock Tunnel.

The New Territories is famous for its exceptions. The Small House Policy (under which male villagers can build a house, supposedly for their own use) is a racket. It has been a notorious racket for 50 years and has the additional drawback of being grossly discriminatory against women. It continues.

The construction of illegal additions to small houses is another flourishing area. Occasionally terrible threats are issued but somehow nothing comes of them and most rural villages, viewed from the air, offer a rich variety of unauthorised fourth floors.

Most people in Hong Kong are not allowed to celebrate the New Year with their own fireworks. Villagers are not covered by this. When I lived in a rural village I recall sitting on my balcony looking down the valley and seeing occasional bursts of firecrackers, followed by plumes of smoke drifting across the landscape. It was like living in Beirut.

I also noticed a suspiciously transient dog population. Eating dogs is not allowed in Hong Kong. Where were all these large black dogs going? I got on very well with my neighbours, by contributing to the village welfare fund and not asking tactless questions.

Anyway with this background in mind I was not horrified or disgusted by the latest legal triumph, the use of applications to use agricultural land for boarding kennels, as a way to cover it in concrete, with a later switch to something more lucrative and industrial.

This was discovered by a careful piece of freelance research by Liber Research Community. HKFP report here.

Reporting on issues of this kind is a delicate matter. One wishes to show readers an actual specimen of the abuse in progress. But this is fraught with danger. One may well suspect that Farmer Wong was not being frank when he applied to build a refuge for homeless dogs on one of his fields. Proving that his application was bogus is another matter even if, two years later, the field is covered with the remains of dead cars. Maybe the homeless hounds were not as numerous as Mr Wong thought.

On the other hand, looking at the overall figures it is depressingly clear what is going on. The researchers looked at 60 sites which had been approved for boarding kennels, of which 19 appeared to be accommodating dogs, 31 were not and ten remain a mystery.

They had no difficulty in finding sites which had completed the process from approval for animal boarding use to approved industrial use. What boggles the mind is the apparent failure of the officials involved to see what was going on.

Consider: between 2015 and 2017 the annual total of applications for planning permission to run animal boarding establishments was seven. Between 2018 and 2020 it averaged 16. The average for 2021-3 was 35. That means that in the last three years more than 100 applications have been filed to run animal boarding places in the New Territories.

Spokespeople for the Town Planning Board say that there is nothing wrong with people moving on from animal boarding to other uses provided they have the proper permission, and offered to inspect relevant sites.

But you have to ask yourself what these people were thinking. Is the market for dog hotels booming on a scale to justify doubling capacity every three years? Or have rural residents acquired a sudden sensitivity to the needs of strays?

The SPCA estimates that Hong Kong has a dog population of some 200,000, which clearly entails some exciting business opportunities. But a study of owner spending on pets found no detectable figure for boarding or hotel costs. Clearly most owners manage to cover holidays by leaving their pets with friends, family members or the domestic helper.

Moreover many boarding kennels operate quite happily in ordinary industrial or commercial buildings in the urban area. Only the owners of large dogs (like mine) need to worry about whether their canine friend will have access to open space.

I do not suggest that the New Territories are a criminals’ paradise. Nor do I wish to encourage paranoia. But a sudden surge in the popularity of a rather exotic land use application should surely have raised a red flag? Would it perhaps help if the protection of the rural environment attracted a small fraction of the law enforcement zeal devoted to the activities of subversive buskers, or the wearers of political tee-shirts.

Read Full Post »

School inspections: is it ‘How can I help?’ or ‘Impress me or die”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 29, 2024| 1 Comment »

School inspections are a funny business. They sit on an obstinate paradox which makes it difficult to have confidence in the results.

An experienced observer can glean quite a lot about a school from walking the corridors: are the students cheerful and well-behaved; what is on the walls? Our observer can gather more from looking at documents: are the teachers planning and conferring, do they attend development courses, are they well qualified for what they are doing? But really if you want to evaluate what is going on you need to visit the place where education actually happens: the classroom.

This is where we trip over the paradox. The classroom is usually populated by the class and the teacher. Add an inspector and you are no longer looking at a normal lesson. The teacher usually knows the inspection is coming and can be tempted to put on a bit of a show.

Less obviously the class may respond to the presence of a stranger. When I did my teaching practice (a long time ago) my classes were fairly riotous. It was an all-boys school, and all the boys knew I was the lowest form of teaching life, and would be leaving after one term anyway. But by a kind convention, during the assessment visits from my tutor everyone behaved impeccably. Teaching briefly became easy.

The important variable in an inspection is the attitude of the inspector, which can range from “How can I help?” to “Impress me or die!” The gentle end of the spectrum can be found in the autobiographical works of Gervase Phinn, who was an inspector in the more photogenic parts of Yorkshire. The harsh end of the scale led to the tragic case of Ruth Perry, a primary school head who killed herself after being told that an inspection would lead to the school being downgraded from “outstanding” to “inadequate”.

Local inspections have generally languished in obscurity until last week, when the Education Department started publishing fairly detailed reports on individual schools. These demonstrated an impressive level of patriotic enthusiasm. Schools were rated on how far they had integrated national security into the curriculum, and whether they had introduced the required national education subjects.

The inspectors also, rather bizarrely, gave their verdicts on the quality of the flag raising ceremonial and the singing of the national anthem. Some schools were chided because the singing was not loud enough.

Public ire ensued, mainly because so many of these criticisms were levelled at two schools catering for “special needs”, the currently acceptable euphemism for children mentally or physically ill-adapted for conventional school life. Many observers, including me, thought that teachers in this demanding field probably had more urgent things to worry about than staging routine patriotic performances.

Special needs teaching is much more difficult than the conventional stuff and demands extraordinary patience, sympathy and persistence. It is one of life’s major injustices that money and prestigious titles (Professor Hamlett to you, Sunshine!) are showered on those who teach a carefully selected audience of consenting adults, while the saintly qualities required of special needs teaching go unheralded and unrewarded.

Having been loudly scolded on-line the Education Bureau subtly shifted its position. If children could not learn about the Basic Law and other constitutional matters they could at least be taught to sing the national anthem.

The bureau said “March of the Volunteers” had “a distinctive rhythm, a high-pitched melody, majestic force and embodies the courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation. Schools have a responsibility to let students understand the etiquette and attitude required when performing the national anthem, so as to cultivate students’ national identity and respect for the country.”

This really does not address the basic question, which is whether teaching primary school kids to sing this particular tune “loudly” is a good use of educational time. After all the anthem was intended as a film score, not a school tune. The rhythm is difficult, the range wide, and there is much variation in both.

The British national anthem (God save the King … or Queen as the case may be) provides an illustrative contrast. It is a plodding, simple tune. It can be played on anything from a kazoo to the Mighty Wurlitzer and everyone who has been required to play it recognises that it is terminally boring. The March of the Volunteers is more exciting, more interesting and more demanding. Some professional musicians have had trouble with it.

I imagine few schools have a band capable of providing the backing so what is proposed is a sort of communal karaoke with a sound track. Students who have not been attending, or not been attending to, lessons in Putonghua will also find they are effectively required to sing in a foreign language.

Under the circumstances complaints about the volume of the singing seem ill-advised. Different halls have different acoustics. Primary school kids are not opera singers and a common reaction to uncertainty about the tune or the words is to drop the volume. As we cannot switch to an easier song we will probably have to put up with this.

Anyway students will survive a few extra singing lessons. Whether the March of the Volunteers can stand this sort of treatment is another matter. Somewhere around the 30th repetition it will cease to embody the “courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation” and come to embody only the Education Department’s enthusiasm for repetitive and boring patriotic performances … by other people. Do you think school inspectors start the week by singing the national anthem together?

No, I don’t think so either.

Read Full Post »

Security chief, red rag, bull … journalists?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »

What is it, one wonders, about Chris Tang, the Secretary for Security, and the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association? Mr Tang, after all, has a lot on his plate. He is responsible for repelling every threat to peace, order and national security in Hong Kong. The latter, we are often told, needs constant alertness and attention. Yet it seems Mr Tang is never too busy to have a go at the HKJA.

The Association is a small voluntary body aiming to serve and protect the interests of people working in journalism. It does the usual things: seminars, workshops, occasional dinners and the odd press release on relevant matters. It has sometimes run a football competition.

Let me declare, if this counts as an interest, that I was a member for many years. When I first arrived in Hong Kong the JA was a bit of an expat hobby. It was founded by two foreigners in the 70s after a scandalous incident in which the Fire Brigade – which in those days, like the police force and for similar reasons, did not welcome press coverage – turned its hoses on the reporters assembled to watch a performance.

In those days people arriving to work in the humbler parts of Hong Kong journalism (I had been recruited by the Standard) did not join the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which regarded people merely writing for local consumption as peasants. You joined the HKJA for the serious stuff and the Press Club for fun.

The Press Club ran a Wanchai bar situated beguilingly between a night club where frustrated rich men could meet mercenary fast ladies, and a motel in which the ensuing relationships could be consummated. Once a year the JA and the Press Club jointly organised a ball, which was what you might call a colourful occasion, both in dress and behaviour.

During the 80s there was a growing culture clash between the two organisations, which led to the HKJA dropping out of the ball and running its own annual fundraising dinner, a more respectable event. The Press Club was rescued from its continuing flirtation with bankruptcy by an unfrocked accountant called Len Dreaver and eventually dropped the Ball. The club closed altogether in 1997 because so many members had left Hong Kong.

After that the HKJA was really the only game in town, unless you could afford the FCC and had a taste for its somewhat expat alcoholic ambience.

During the ensuing 20 years or so I do not remember any particular tension between the HKJA and the Security Branch. There was a period in which I was regularly recruited to do a session on media relations with officers approaching promotion; after each session we of course had some open discussion, and this often featured complaints about inaccurate or intrusive reporting.

I imagine in most places with a free press you would get the same sort of thing. We would then go on to laments about the absence of a complaint mechanism for people upset about their treatment by the media, to which I would reply that we would be quite happy to have a complaints procedure as long as it was modelled on the police one.

This was all good clean fun and embodied the commonsense truism that the relationship between press and police will always involve some conflict because the objectives of the two groups sometimes coincide and sometimes don’t.

This brings us to 2019 when relations understandably became a bit strained. Mr Tang was then in charge of the police. The HKJA, like any journalists’ union worthy of the name, eagerly pressed for access to events and against violence inflicted on its members.

Since that time Mr Tang has resoundingly condemned the association and all its works on several occasions, questioning who it represents, who it gets its money from and whether it should be invited to press conferences on relevant matters. He has accused it of “infiltrating schools” and defending people who swore at policewomen. At one point he suggested the association should publicise its entire membership list, a curious suggestion from a government which condemned the publication of national security judges’ mere names as “doxing”.

This barrage gave the understandable impression, in the context of the times, that the HKJA was expected either to disband itself, like the Professional Teachers Union, or elect a more “patriotic” – or more tactfully “neutral” – leadership, like the Hong Kong Bar Association.

And so to last Friday, when the HKJA elected a new leadership, and Mr Tang rose to the occasion with “Looking at [the list of candidates], it looks more like a foreign journalist association to me. Most of them are journalists from foreign media, some are freelancers, some are not even journalists and their organisations have engaged in political activities.” Mr Tang was disturbed that the executive was light on representatives from local mainstream media.

Actually this has always been a problem, if it is a problem. Many mainstream media proprietors are violently opposed to trade unions generally and particularly to trade unions which seek to represent their employees. The JA leadership has consequently always been a bit overweight on the non-profit-making parts of the media business, like RTHK, and underweight on major media groups in private ownership. Insert the usual suspects here.

One must add that over the last five years or so the mainstream media have much diminished, and are now heavily outnumbered by the directly or indirectly state-owned sector, and the voluntary castrato chorus whose owners like a quiet life.

Many journalists who are still trying to pursue the activity in its traditional form may now feel that their lives are exciting enough without accepting office in an organisation which is clearly in the government’s crosshairs. In fact two members of the executive put in their resignations between the end of nominations and the counting of the votes.

Still, the question who is a journalist seems to be one about which one can think of more reliable sources than Mr Tang. Bernard Levin memorable pondered in one piece whether journalism was an art, a craft, a trade, a confidence trick or a disease. Each of these theories would lead to a different definition but none of them supports the suggestion that entry to the profession should be monitored by a retired policeman.

What seems to me worthy of comment and universally overlooked is that Mr Tang’s preoccupation with the HKJA has apparently led to spying on it. No doubt the identities of the candidates and their professional activities were transmitted to voters. But Mr Tang is, I presume, not an HKJA member so he was not entitled to see them.

Commenting on the antecedents and character of the candidates looks dangerously close to the sort of intimidating letter which concludes with some such phrase as “we know where you live”.

So I salute the incoming executive, who are no doubt well aware that one mis-step could bring them a long encounter with the government’s correctional servants. As Sophie Scholl wrote: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail if there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?”

Read Full Post »

In the UK a year’s delay is a possible abuse of legal process. In Hong Kong it’s business as usual

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It is nice to know that we still enjoy the rule of law, as we are constantly reminded. Still there are some important differences between the rule as practised in Hong Kong and what happens in other places.

This was brought home to me last week by reports of the legal problems of Sam Kerr. Ms Kerr is a woman footballer of extraordinary gifts who plays for Chelsea Women and Australia, the country she comes from. Last season’s output here – this year she has been sidelined by a knee injury.

Ms Kerr went out with friends and team-mates to celebrate her team’s victory in the Women’s FA Cup last year and had a few – well perhaps more than a few – drinks, leading to a dispute with a taxi driver and an ensuing dispute with a policeman.

The sequel to this rather routine sequence of events illustrates the different treatments accorded to the normal man in the street, famous footballers, and famous female footballers, when they succumb to the effects of alcohol.

When I was a court reporter people who got drunk in public places were routinely charged with what we called D and D, or Drunk and Disorderly. There were cases most weeks but we did not have to report many of them because the defendant was usually from outside our circulation area.

People who got drunk in public places were either itinerant street sleepers who drank in public because they could not afford to get plastered in a pub with the respectable alcoholics, or holidaymakers who drank in public because they did not want to stop when the pubs closed for the afternoon break which was legally required in those days.

The trial proceeded more as a ritual than a debate. The arresting officer would recite from memory the traditional description of the arrest: “the defendant was shouting and waving his arms about. When I approached him he smelled of alcohol. His eyes were glazed, he was unsteady on his feet and his speech was slurred. I concluded he was drunk.”

The arresting officer would then read out the defendant’s reaction to being arrested, which was often rude though occasionally amusing. I cherish the memory of “Go away and leave me alone or I shall call a policeman.”

The defendant, usually lawyerless, would then offer some mitigation or explanation, with a pledge of future sobriety. After one particularly eloquent promise of future abstinence the presiding magistrate said, quite gently, “Yes. That is what you said last time.”

The defendant would then be sentenced to a small fine, which meant if he was penniless, as he usually was, a few days in prison for non-payment.

If the person concerned is more famous, naturally, this harmless ritual may or may not be changed. Male footballers, like male politicians, are generally expected to be enthusiastic drinkers and would generally have to do something quite attention-grabbing to set the legal wheels in motion.

The situation of women is rather different. After long deliberation the prosecutorial machinery decided that Ms Kerr should be charged on the basis of her “verbal” on being accosted by the arresting cop with “causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to a police officer.” It may be – the prosecution and defence differ on this point – that she called him a “stupid white bastard.”

Perhaps I am getting old, but I do not remember policemen being so sensitive when I lived in London. In Australia “bastard” is almost a term of endearment, I presume the policeman was not shocked to discover that he was “white” and stupidity is in the eye of the beholder. Ms Kerr may well be sensitive about race; she has ancestors from India.

Anyway this was not the feature of the case which had me rolling on the floor laughing. The odd feature of the case was that her legal team was planning to claim the charge should be dismissed as an “abuse of process” because she was not charged for a year.

Good grief! A mere year? How unlike the life of our own dear justice system. A year in Hong Kong is nothing. The Secretary for Security recently told legislators that the time for a protest-related case to work its way from first appearance before magistrate to conclusion in District Court is “generally from 300 to 400 days or so”.

A team of researchers from the University of Georgetown commented in 2023 that:

Defendants must wait an exceptionally long time to reach trial. We found that more than 41.8 per cent of protest cases take more than a year to complete, with an average wait of 343 days, but this number almost certainly underestimates the true situation as it only includes counts that have completed; those with the longest wait times have now been waiting for well over two years.

And some of them continued to wait. Trials relating to the storming of Legco and disorders at Chinese U, both in 2019, came up last year. A man charged with posting subversive Facebook messages in 2020 was tried only last week. The famous 47, after first hearings at which most of them were refused bail in March 2021, are still awaiting a verdict, as are staff of Stand News, a case also started in 2021.

Probably the current record-holder is Benny Tai, who was charged in July 2021 with election offences committed in 2016. But the competition is lively. The latest prosecution arising from the Yuen Long incident was brought only this year. Of the 10,000 people arrested at one time or another in 2019 there are still at least 8,000 who have not yet appeared in court.

These inordinate delays should not have come as a surprise. Senior barristers warned in 2021 that the justice system could not handle the volume of cases brought to it by a policy of leaving no suspect unprosecuted and no pound of flesh uncollected. They suggested that prosecutors should not pursue cases in which no violence was involved.

This suggestion was not well received. So here we are. Legal delays are not so much feared as expected. The Director of Environmental Protection was recently asked if the government feared its latest development brainwave would be challenged in court. He said “Every judicial review will bring harm to the whole of society. No matter who wins or loses, it will take a long time, often years, to complete.”

Well it takes years to do anything. We have already had one case in which the convicted defendant walked free at the end of the trial because his time already spent in custody exceeded the prison term to which he was sentenced.

Part of the problem may be that Hong Kong judges are used to working rather slowly. They take long breaks. Hearings start later and end earlier than most peoples’ working days. At the end of the trial the judge or judges may take months to produce a decision.

This owes something to the prosecutors’ evident aversion to juries. In a jury trial the question of guilt or innocence is answered by the jury and the judge goes straight on to passing sentence. If there is no jury he must not only determine guilt but give written reasons for doing so. These will be carefully examined by the defence and, possibly, the Court of Appeal. So some care is understandable.

Still, there is someone responsible for all this, and that is the Secretary for Justice, Paul Lam. Mr Lam recently assured us all that we are free to criticise the government so he will presumably not mind my saying that he presiding over a disaster area. Faced with a shortage of capacity in the justice factory he has failed either to expand the staff, speed up the production line or reduce the production quota. So the unfinished work is piling up.

The DoJ’s Prosecution Code says that, “The prosecutor must be alert to the rights of an accused which are relevant to the prosecution process, including equality before the law, the rights to have confidential legal advice, to be presumed innocent, and to have a fair trial without undue delay (my italics) under Basic Law Articles 25, 35 and 87 (Bill of Rights Articles 10 and 11).

Is that requirement really satisfied if the defendant can fit in a four-year degree between arrest and verdict?

Read Full Post »

We should not be expected to pretend that press freedom has survived recent changes intact

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 15, 2024| 4 Comments »

A strange, indeed barely believable, controversy has erupted over a question which appears hardly disputable: whether Hong Kong still enjoys the degree of press freedom that it did before 2020.

Nothing has changed is the official line pushed by official government spokesmen in Beijing, echoed by local gaslighter general Grenville Cross in newspaper pieces. For the opposite view we have Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiéres or RSF if you are subject to Quebec Province language laws) who are the compilers and curators of the relevant international league table, the World Press Freedom Index.

The message provided by the index is stark. Two decades ago Hong Kong was right up there among the respectable countries to which one might wish to emigrate, at number 18. In 2023 it was number 140 out of 180 countries covered. This year it improved to 138. The compilers gloomily noted that this was not because Hong Kong’s score had improved, but because some others we must now consider rivals had deteriorated.

As a result we have now surpassed South Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia and Lebanon. That is the sort of company in which we now find ourselves.

I realise that compiling tables of this kind is not an exact science. Indicators have to be selected, turned into numbers and aggregated. During this process choices have to be made and different choices will produce different results.

On the other hand it is difficult to believe that any subtle adjustment of the methodology would produce much alleviation of a 120-place drop down the table. People are free to wonder about the details: are we really worse than Bolivia? They may argue that things could be worse. China, after all, sits in place 172 this year, rescued from a lower slot by massive deterioration in Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea.

However the complacency crew prefer simply to ignore all this. They also ignore some rather obvious anecdotal milestones. When the News of the World was caught in criminal mischief its owner, Rupert Murdoch, was summoned to a hearing in the House of Commons. He was not paraded through his newsroom in chains.

When the Hong Kong Standard was found to have fraudulently faked its circulation figures the owner was not prosecuted at all. The explanation, vigorously propagated by Mr Cross in his previous role as a government lawyer, was that such a prosecution might have resulted in the owner, Sally Au Sian, closing the newspaper and putting hundreds of its employees out of work.

The 900 or so journalists and many other workers who have lost their jobs due to the current spate of prosecutions will no doubt wish that this consideration still found favour in the Department of Justice. Mr Cross, like his successors, seems to have discarded it.

I still encounter working journalists from time to time, as well as people who used to be working journalists, and there is a clear consensus in the profession that times have changed. Indeed a common topic of conversation at journalists’ gatherings these days is who will be next for closure, jail or exile.

Perhaps this is too pessimistic. Mr Cross’s argument, shorn of some wolf warrior points about British hypocrisy, rests on two feet. One is that press freedom is protected by the Bill of Rights, the Basic Law, the National Security Law and its local supplement. The other is that large numbers of media organisations still have “a presence” in Hong Kong.

To take the second point first, this is not an indication of anything except, possibly, that Hong Kong is an easier place for journalists than the mainland, hardly a tribute to our “vigourous media scene”. The figure cited is for December of last year, so it does not include recent departures like those of Radio Free Asia and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Also the inclusion of a “public service broadcaster” in the scene hardly does justice to recent changes at RTHK.

But the legal side is Mr Cross’s speciality and here we are perhaps entitled to be most disappointed.

The Bill of Rights Ordinance was a genuine attempt to entrench notions of human rights in the Hong Kong legal system. It failed. Judges, possibly sensing an attempt to lure them into a political minefield, refused to cooperate. Attempts to rely on the newly codified rights were usually rejected on the grounds that the ordinance merely enumerated the rights that were protected under the existing law. The only substantive effect of the ordinance was the deletion of some “reverse onus” arrangements, under which the defendant was in some circumstances required to prove his innocence instead of the usual arrangement under which the prosecution has to prove guilt.

Judges have been equally unreceptive to suggestions that the provisions about rights in the Basic Law should be interpreted as invalidating any existing law which violates those rights. The national security law is, of course, above local supervision and any attempt to limit its purview would be over-ruled by Beijing.

It is a characteristic of legislation that it supersedes whatever was there before it so the local Article 23 legislation is not going to be much help in court either. Hong Kong, in short, has very fine verbal protections for freedom of the press, but they are in practice no help at all. They are like the similar protections in the PRC constitution. The talk is there; the walk is not.

This is regarded as a commonplace item of information outside Hong Kong and the idea that press freedom in the territory has been curtailed neither originated in nor is confined to the British Foreign Office. It is no doubt held with particular enthusiasm by the three freelance journalists who were refused admission last year, as well as the RSF representative who was barred more recently.

It may well be that things could be worse. We do not have prior censorship yet. The number of apps mysteriously absent from the Apple store matches the number in Russia, but not the much higher number in China. I can still write that we do not live on Planet Cross.

It may also be that national security requires sacrifices, and a reduction in the degree of press freedom available is one of them. I wouldn’t dare express an opinion on that. It is not my nation. But cake cannot be simultaneously had and eaten. Maybe the destruction could have been worse. Maybe it was worth it. But we should not be required to pretend it has not happened.

Read Full Post »

Civil service numbers suggest our happiness may have been exaggerated

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The finer points of civil servant staffing are not usually a hot news topic. But the latest grim update from the Civil Service Bureau was eagerly covered by both English-language newspapers. This may have been an effort to avoid the alternative story offered the same day about civil service dismissals.

But it was not surprising that different reporters made different choices. The “source” was the Civil Service Bureau’s written replies to questions from legislators in response to the budget speech. These were all published on the same day, involved a great deal of repetition and ran to no less than 362 pages.

Having browsed in this heap of information I think I would have gone for the dismissals as being more interesting. The leading reasons for dismissal from the civil service in the last five years were:

  • Failure to get a COVID vaccination (21 cases)
  • Absence/lateness (20)
  • Shoplifting/theft (18)
  • Sex-related offences (14)

Offences against public order and other protest-related peccadilloes only amounted to six. My personal favourite category was “Others (e.g. illegal gambling, perverting the course of justice, computer-related offences, murder etc)”. It is nice to know that murder is grounds for dismissal, though other punishments are probably more salient to the criminal concerned.

However, to the grim news. This was that, as the Standard put it, “The bureau said on Friday that the number of departures in the civil service increased from over 8,500 people in the year 2018-2019 to over 10,100 people in the year 2022-2023. Among them, nearly 1,000 people were under 30, and almost 3,000 had less than ten years of service.”

This might lead the careless reader to think that civil servants were heading for the nearest exit in droves. Hong Kong has about 160,000 civil servants and the normal length of service for a graduate entrant would be something over 30 years. So you would in normal circumstances expect about 5,000 people a year to leave simply because they have reached the retirement age.

And unless I have completely misunderstood the Civil Service bureau’s tables, that is roughly what happens. More than half of the 10,000 “departures” were because of “retirement” (5,918 out of 10,126 in 2022-3). The category which we should be worrying about is “resignation”, which is much lower but rising (1,863 in 2020-21, 3,863 in 2022-23).

And the worrying thing about this is that if you look at the departures broken down by age groups the figures for 20-50 total 3,479, nearly half of whom are in the 30-40 bracket. There must be at least a suspicion that many of these comparatively young professionals are not just leaving the civil service, but Hong Kong as well.

This in turn suggests that official estimates of the level of happiness produced by recent changes have been somewhat exaggerated.

This is rather born out by the figures for individual departments. The two which are particularly beset by a large number of unfilled vacancies are RTHK and the Police Force.

RTHK had the highest vacancy rate of any government department, at 24 per cent. No wonder they have robots reading the weather bulletin. Indeed, looking at their news output there is clearly a wider role for Artificial Intelligence. Even a dumb computer can rewrite government press releases, which seem to be the favoured news source these days.

The highest absolute number of vacancies is in the police force. The force had 1,180 resignations last year which, looking on the bright side, was lower than the record high of 1,802 recorded in 2019-20.

It appears, unsurprisingly, that life in the force since 2019 has changed, and the arrival of national security and peaceful streets has produced further different changes, leaving quite a lot of police folk feeling that the new lifestyle is not what they signed up for.

In particular the force is, alas, no longer held in the high levels of public esteem to which it believed itself to be accustomed and entitled. It has a large and efficient public relations organisation. But expecting adroit reputation management to obliterate painful real-world memories involving tear gas and pepper spray is to ask more than public relations can deliver.

Read Full Post »

On the ethics of the Octopus button

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 8, 2024| 2 Comments »

An interesting ethical dilemma cropped up on my local green minibus the other day. Of course this is unusual; discussions of moral philosophy are not common on the 69K, but there it was.

To understand the issue at stake we must briefly explain that there are three ways in which your Octopus card in the special elderly version, now known as Joyyou, works on public transport. On the MTR your entry and exit are recorded. The machinery knocks $2 off your Octopus and bills the government for the rest of what the journey would have cost.

On big buses the situation is different. Your Octopus is read when you get on, but not when you get off. So the charge assumes that you travel to the end of the line. Of course the fare drops as the end of the line gets closer, but if you get off early that is the government’s tough luck. You still pay $2 but the government is charged for the whole trip, including the part you weren’t on the bus for.

This wrinkle in the system is the source of some anguish among transport officials, because they suspect that some people are avoiding queues or ensuring a seat by getting on unpopular long route buses for short trips.

Minibuses feature a system of their own. There is a button on the Octopus reader. If you press it the default setting – the fare to the end of the line – is replaced. The machine cycles through the possible fares, and if you plan to get off early you can choose the appropriate one.

We Joyyous elderly folk do not have to worry about this, which is perhaps just as well. Our other local green minibus route, the 811, is notorious for the grumpiness of its drivers. This is because it has a complex range of fares, so the drivers are constantly asked which one is applicable by baffled passengers.

Well, on my rare minibus excursions I simply dab the Octopus, which costs me $2. But this, according to our local street philosophers, may be wrong. If I am traveling to the end of the line the government is charged the rest of the fare, which means currently about five bucks. If I am getting off earlier I can push the fare change button and the government will accordingly cough up only the lower fare, minus my $2.

The person who raised this issue suggested that those of us who were not adjusting the government’s contribution according to the length of our trips (I must admit that in my case it had not crossed my mind that this was possible, but still …) were increasing the government’s already considerable financial problems and were accordingly guilty of antisocial behaviour.

This view did not go unchallenged. Some passengers thought that as the government’s money was our money there was no reason why we should not decide to use some of it to support our local minibus company, an important and unsubsidised public service.

Pessimists noted that the passenger getting a $2 trip had nothing to gain by pushing the button, and the driver had nothing to gain by encouraging it. So it was not very realistic to expect people to take the trouble. Underlying these arguments, perhaps, is the changing relationship between Hong Kong people and their government in recent years.

This point seems lost on local lawmakers, some of whom have been dangerously keen to abolish or curtail the whole $2 ride scheme. Be careful, gentlemen. It is the public’s general suspicion that some legislators are there to help the people, and some to help themselves. Cutting benefits to which you are not entitled could put you in the second category.

Admittedly the scheme is expensive. It is expected to cost a total of about $6 billion this year. The introduction of a senile card with a picture of the holder is expected to curtail fraud considerably.

But everyone knows why the costs have gone through the roof: it was Carrie Lam’s foolish decision to lower the age of eligibility to 60. Most people aged 60 are still working, officially or unofficially. Someone who is still commuting five days a week could easily make 20 subsidised trips a week, before he starts on leisure or shopping trips. After the change was made the number of subsidised trips a day almost doubled, from 480,000 a day in March 2022 to 890,000 in March last year.

But withdrawing or curtailing benefits of this kind has problems of its own. It is a commonplace of behavioural economics that losses produce more pain than the pleasure produced by gains of similar size. This means that if you give the public something, and then take it away, we do not all return to where we started. We are all pissed off.

So we have here an interesting dilemma for the Financial Secretary. Still, looking on the bright side, Hong Kong is well placed to weather the coming increase in the proportion of elderly people in the population. This is because, compared with many other advanced societies, it is extremely sparing in providing pensions.

The only non-mean-tested benefit is the fruit money, which is paltry. The other benefits, which are less paltry, are only for those who can prove their poverty. So must of us dinosaurs do not get much for our years of dutiful taxpaying. Cheap rides are welcome. If the government wants to reduce the costs of the scheme without offending beneficiaries in the 60-65 age range, it might consider switching the concession off during rush hours.

Read Full Post »

Surely the national security loopholes were not as big as this?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It seems to be a rule nowadays that no criticism from overseas of our local national security arrangements can be allowed to pass unchallenged, or indeed uncondemned. This is fair enough, although no doubt it would be fairer if local criticism were still allowed.

No doubt there are many matters in this area on which intelligent people might politely disagree. We are all entitled to our opinions. But, as a great editor of the Guardian once put it, comments are free but facts are sacred. I do not wish to express any opinion on the merits of recent legislation. Its defenders, though, should be discouraged from rewriting history.

This brings us to Mr Ambrose Lam San-keung, who recently penned a piece for the China Daily defending the latest legal changes against criticism from the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. The institute, said Mr Lam, has made “unsubstantiated claims” about the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.

Mr Lam then canters through the usual whataboutisms – some Western countries provide no protection for whistleblowers, some limit the right to choose counsel, and so on. And then we come to this:

“No country would allow any seditious speech or publication that incites mutiny, disaffection, hatred, violent acts, or disobeying laws. No country would allow any association to provide training in using offensive weapons or military exercises without the government’s permission. No country would accept any assembly that aimed at sabotaging public infrastructure.

Surprisingly, before the enactment of the Ordinance, Hong Kong enjoyed “freedom” of incitement, sedition, unlawful military training, and sabotage of public infrastructure. As a result, riots broke out in 2014, 2016 and 2019.”

China Daily, April 1

I take this to mean that, in Mr Lam’s view, Hong Kong had no laws against incitement, sedition, unlawful military training or sabotage of public infrastructure, and this absence caused the riots in 2014 (sic), 2016 and 2019. This is an “unsubstantiated claim”.

Leaving aside the questionable matter of cause and effect – I do not recall any rioter explaining his malfeasance as a protest against the absence of relevant laws – the matter of large legal absences is easily dealt with:

  • Incitement and sedition were first criminalised by the Seditious Publications Ordinance of 1913. The ban was extended to acts by the Sedition Ordinance of 1938 and the whole matter was wrapped up in the Crimes Ordinance in 1971, at which point inspiring disaffection or mutiny in the disciplined forces was added. We may note in passing that the sedition offence was abolished in the UK in 2009 as archaic, infringing valuable freedoms and “used by other countries as justification for the retention of similar laws which have been actively used to suppress political dissent and restrict press freedom.” Present company excepted, of course.
  • Sabotage of public infrastructure was covered by the law on criminal damage, which resides in the Crimes Ordinance Section 60. It includes: “A person who without lawful excuse destroys or damages any property belonging to another intending to destroy or damage it or being reckless as to whether it would be destroyed or damaged is liable to imprisonment for 10 years. If a person destroys or damages any property … intending to endanger the life of another or being reckless as to whether the life of another would be thereby endangered is also guilty of this offence and is liable to imprisonment for life.”
  • The law on unlawful military training is also in the Crimes Ordinance, at Section 18, under which it is an offence if a person “trains or drills any other person in the use of arms or the practice of military exercises or evolutions” without the permission of the Governor or the Commissioner of Police.”

Mr Lam is an educated member of a learned profession so we must accept that when he writes rubbish he really believes what he says, and is not merely spouting propaganda “being reckless as to whether” it is true or not.

Disturbingly, he is also a member of the Legislative Council. His latest writings give rise to some doubt as to whether all members of that body had even a superficial knowledge of the existing law when they agreed to substantial amendments of it.

More disturbingly still, Mr Lam sits in the council on behalf of the legal functional constituency. He is in fact a lawyer. You might think that other members would expect learned and accurate advice from him about upcoming and existing legislation, and that opinions on these matters which fall from his lips would be particularly influential for non-legal members.

In his defence, I suppose, Mr Lam might blame the copy editor who worked on his offering, which will cut no ice with me because I used to be one. Or he could say that he did not mean what he appeared to mean and I have perversely insisted on using a literal meaning which was not what he intended.

Legislators – and lawyers – should be careful in their choice of words.

Read Full Post »

New National Security law is open to abuse; lawmakers should fix it

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 11, 2024| 2 Comments »

The thing that worries me about the proposed local national security legislation is that it seems to have been drafted with scant consideration of the likely consequences in practice. After all our judges and prosecutors have already had national security legislation to play with for three years, and some things have become obvious.

For example, the arrangement for bail in national security cases is in theory that the magistrate must be satisfied that the defendant is not going to commit another national security offence if released pending trial.

As the organised opposition, or even the organised criticism, has been trampled into the dust and the revised constitution no longer offers a role for dissident politicians you would think this was a fairly easy condition to satisfy. In practice the prosecution invariably opposes bail and in the vast majority of cases bail is refused.

Similarly under the existing national security law the Secretary for Justice may – but does not have to – ask for a juryless trial before three national security judges. On every occasion so far when a jury trial might have been appropriate the prosecution has in fact opted for a juryless trial. It is difficult to believe that this is entirely unconnected with the pleasures of having three judges of your own choice deciding on the success of your prosecution. Accordingly it seems likely that this is now a routine practice and there will never be a national security trial before a jury.

Turning to the new proposed “Article 23” version we can see number of areas where something similar may be expected to happen.

Consider for example the proposed exemption from the rule that a suspect in custody must be charged or released within two days. This will be replaced by an arrangement under which a senior police person can ask for 14 days of uncharged custody to allow inquiries to proceed, with the possibility of further renewals for seven days at a time.

In other jurisdictions this is a rarely used option which comes up in cases where the prosecution would have to rely on, and disclose in open court, evidence obtained clandestinely or from an overseas source. It was introduced in a panic after a raft of terrorism cases, and it was and is clearly understood that it would be used seldom, in cases where there was a real concern about what the arrested person might get up to if released.

No such condition is incorporated in the proposed law here. In the light of practice so far you have to be very optimistic to dismiss the possibility that arrested suspects will be subjected to an ordeal practically undistinguishable from indefinite detention without trial or charge. The police will always find it convenient to have the suspect to themselves for two weeks. They will also find it easy.

The limit on detention is of course a limit on police powers, and it is intentionally so. It is an important protection for suspects who, in the end, may not be charged at all, and if charged may in the end be acquitted. We can all think of cases in which it would be necessary and desirable that a suspect should be detained for more than the stipulated couple of days without charge. In practice, though, that is likely to become a rule, rather than an exception.

I have similar misgivings about the proposed restrictions on suspects’ right to choose their own lawyers. Once again we can all think of scenarios in which this might be a useful power, and might be used to prevent a serious breach of public order. Once again we have to wonder whether it will be used as rarely as these unusual scenarios imply.

Or there is the curious proposed arrangement under which national security prisoners would not be eligible for early release on the same terms as other prisoners. This is curious because we must supposed that the existing arrangements for early release include an assessment of the inmate’s chances of reoffending if returned to the outside world.

Asking the Commissioner for Correctional Services to certify in addition that the prisoner will not reoffend against the national security legislation places a civil servant with no relevant expertise in a hot seat, from which the most comfortable exit will be to refuse to release the person concerned. Which is perhaps the intention.

Then there is the question of “absconders”. An absconder, properly understood, is someone who has been charged with an offence and flees the city to avoid trial. On the other hand Hong Kong people have the right to emigrate if they wish to do so and there is nothing in law or morality to suggest that they have a duty to return to Hong Kong if the authorities later decide to charge them with an offence.

As before we can all think of rare occasions when a more flexible interpretation of this would be useful, and there would be some legitimate purpose in the proposed laws against people having anything to do with an “absconder”. We can also see scenarios in which a sensitive government, stung by criticism in an overseas country from a Hong Kong exile, would charge him with an offence, issue an arrest warrant and classify him as an “absconder” on the basis of actions or words which were perfectly legal in the place where the actor or speaker did or spoke them.

Of course defenders of the proposed legislation will say that we should trust officials to do the right thing and not abuse powers which are clearly open to abuse. But our government has form in this area.

The rule of law requires that the powers conferred on officials should be used in good faith for the purposes for which they were intended, as Lord Bingham put it in an important book on the subject. But this is not what we see in Hong Kong. Here we see opposition coffee shops submerged in an avalanche of sanitary inspections, inconvenient bookshops driven out of business by a similar sort of bureaucratic persecution, and huge tax bills landing mysteriously in the letterboxes of organisations that have had the temerity to ignore calls for their dissolution in the government’s poodle press.

Legislators should approach proposed legislation on the basis that if a power can be abused it will be abused, and adjust it accordingly. Critics condemn the new patriotic legislature as a puppet parliament, a congress of complacency full of people who have never seen a government proposal they didn’t like. The new national security bill is a chance for legislators to prove the critics wrong. Or not.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »