{"id":59556,"date":"2016-09-23T17:37:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T17:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=59556 "},"modified":"2016-09-23T17:37:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T17:37:00","slug":"59556-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=59556","title":{"rendered":"A tale of two courts: How does Hong Kong compare to China?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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22 September 2016<\/span><\/p>

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Pro-democracy political activists and members of the Demosisto party (centre back L to R) Nathan Law, Joshua Wong and Alex ChowImage copyrightGETTY IMAGES Image caption<\/span><\/p>

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A visit to a courthouse can tell you much about the norms and values of any society.<\/span><\/p>

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And there can be few starker ways to experience the differences between Hong Kong and mainland China.<\/span><\/p>

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Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow – the leaders of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement – turned up at the city’s Eastern Magistrates Court to cheers from supporters.<\/span><\/p>

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They stood on the steps and made speeches into a portable PA system while a large crowd of waiting journalists surged out of the press area set aside for them and onto the court steps.<\/span><\/p>

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The police looked on good-naturedly.<\/span><\/p>

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Inside, seats were allocated on a first come, first serve basis but an extra allowance was made for the high level of interest and some reporters were allowed to stand.<\/span><\/p>

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And then, as the lead prosecutor made a somewhat faltering pitch to have the three defendants thrown into jail, the magistrate made mincemeat of his arguments.<\/span><\/p>

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It was an exercise in openness and transparency, as legal principles and precedents were debated.<\/span><\/p>

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And at the end of it all the three young men once again walked free with the court rejecting the prosecution claim that the original sentences had been too lenient.<\/span><\/p>

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Joshua Wong, a teenager who became the poster-boy for the protest movement that dared to stand up to Beijing, will begin serving his community service order on Friday.<\/span><\/p>

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He will work as a helper in his local library.<\/span><\/p>

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For a total of 80 hours.<\/span><\/p>

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‘The hand of Beijing’<\/span><\/p>

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In contrast, I’ve been to many courts in an attempt to cover many trials in many cities in mainland China.<\/span><\/p>

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I’ve rarely been allowed to get close to one, let alone in one.<\/span><\/p>

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I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen supporters of the accused dragged away – with even family members, desperate for news of a long-detained loved one, loaded into the waiting police buses.<\/span><\/p>

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The proceedings, gleaned only from reports in the Communist Party-controlled media, are a glimpse of a system that is anything but transparent.<\/span><\/p>

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The country’s judges, also Communist Party-controlled of course, convict more than 99.9% of defendants who appear before them.<\/span><\/p>

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And for those offences that involve defying the will of the Communist Party – simply calling for political reform for example – the accused can expect to serve years in prison.<\/span><\/p>

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It puts Wong’s library service into stark relief and illustrates what’s at stake in the fractious, polarised fight for the future of this city.<\/span><\/p>

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On one side, there are many – particularly those who felt inconvenienced by the street blockades two years ago – who will feel frustration with what will seem an unduly lenient punishment.<\/span><\/p>

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But on the other side, for the pro-democracy camp, the striking demonstration of judicial independence suggests that Hong Kong’s freedoms are not under the kind of immediate threat from Beijing that they sometimes claim.<\/span><\/p>

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“The hand of Beijing is everywhere in Hong Kong,” Nathan Law told me ahead of the sentence review hearing.<\/span><\/p>

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Of course, the real debate is over how best to safeguard these freedoms in the future.<\/span><\/p>

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Ironically, two years on, the direct result of the Umbrella Movement is that Hong Kong now has less democracy than it would have done.<\/span><\/p>

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Next year’s election for the city’s highest political office were meant to be the first to take place under universal suffrage.<\/span><\/p>

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But the pro-democracy movement has blocked that plan because of its objections to the rules – set down in the city’s constitution and insisted on by Beijing – that the candidates for that election must be pre-vetted by a nominating committee.<\/span><\/p>

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The committee’s make-up locks in a pro-establishment bias and would make it all but impossible for a pro-democratic reform candidate to make it onto the ballot.<\/span><\/p>

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So the debate can be summed up like this; for the pro-Beijing camp, some democracy is better than none, for the anti-Beijing camp, sham democracy is no democracy at all.<\/span><\/p>

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The debate will rage on in a Hong Kong becoming more polarised, fractious and nervous about its relationship with an increasingly assertive and powerful China.<\/span><\/p>

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As if to prove the point, after the sentencing ruling, scuffles broke out on the steps of the court with protesters from each side trading blows.<\/span><\/p>

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Freedom in abundance?<\/span><\/p>

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Back in Beijing, where I live, in my conversations with people I meet and interview I rarely hear people complain about the lack of democracy.<\/span><\/p>

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The idea of voting seems an abstract, distant irrelevance to most people’s lives.<\/span><\/p>

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But people are acutely aware of their lack of other rights and, in particular, the impossibility of getting a fair hearing when they find themselves – as so many do – on the wrong end of a land dispute or the victim of medical negligence or snarled up in a myriad of other minor injustices.<\/span><\/p>

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The idea of being able to hold authority fairly to account in a court of law is a distant fantasy.<\/span><\/p>

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Hong Kong<\/span> has that freedom in abundance and it is valued by all sides in the current debate.<\/span><\/p>

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One side believes it can only be preserved through pragmatic engagement with the sovereign power in Beijing.<\/span><\/p>

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The other that only genuine democracy can act as a bulwark against the gradual erosion of Hong Kong’s special status by a political system that neither understands or values it.<\/span><\/p>

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Outside the court, the three young democracy activists vowed to use their freedom to continue to protest.<\/span><\/p>

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First though, there’s library service to attend to.<\/span><\/p>

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For detail please visit here<\/span><\/a><\/p>

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<div>Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow – the leaders of Hong Kong's pro-democracy Umbrella Movement – turned up at the city's Eastern Magistrates Court to cheers from supporters.They stood on the steps and made speeches into a portable PA system while a large crowd of waiting journalists surged out of the press area set aside for them and onto the court steps.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}