The PRC's "Rectification Campaign" Finds Its Way to Hong Kong's Courts

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is a strong statement from Samuel Chu, Managing Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council in Washington DC, criticizing the HK court’s decision to terminate the bail of Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Ivan Lam instead of allowing them to remain free until sentencing on December 2.

I echo this criticism but hope for more information about the reasons for the defendants’ guilty pleas. Sometimes defendants plead guilty because they admit guilt as an act of civil disobedience committed in protest against injustice. Sometimes they plead guilty in order to induce the court to grant a lighter sentence than would be imposed after putting the state and themselves to the burdens and expense of a trial.

Here it seems they may have pleaded guilty in protest against what they anticipate would be an unfair trial before a court that they presume has fallen under the influence of Beijing’s intensifying efforts to restrict and emasculate the local judiciary, even in cases that do not come within the purview of the new National Security Law. 

As sometimes occurs in Mainland China, defendants in similar circumstances may nevertheless prefer to defend themselves in a trial, even though they know the trial will prove a farce, will be conducted in secret and without the participation of adequate defense counsel, and will result in heavier punishment.

Apparently, Joshua and his colleagues believe that recent events have demonstrated that Beijing has already succeeded in its intensifying pressures to bring Hong Kong judges to heel. We will have to read his explanation when available. 

Some pro-Beijing critics of the Hong Kong courts’ independence, however, believe that much more still needs to be done to root out those judges who are deemed to be disloyal, unpatriotic, unaware of the true nature of the constitutional system imposed by the Basic Law, unduly sympathetic to protesters or incompetent.

In an essay that was published today by The Diplomat, I mention some of the measures that are being contemplated in order to heed the unspecific but militant call for Hong Kong “judicial reform” recently issued by Zhang Xiaoming, deputy director of the Central Government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office.

We should note that, while Beijing is waging this campaign to reform Hong Kong’s judiciary, it has also recently launched a nationwide “rectification campaign” to weed out from the country’s judges, prosecutors and police all those “two-faced people” who are disloyal and dishonest to the Party. As many international media have reported, PRC political-legal officials have been ordered to “turn the blade inward and scrape poison off the bone”!

Hong Kong is not likely to be spared.