By Jerome A. Cohen
Here is the latest disturbing news from Hong Kong. After refusing a police demand for information, four members of the group that plans the city’s annual Tiananmen Massacre vigil were arrested. Note in the HKFP's story Carrie Lam's defense of this attack. It is not, she claims, a crackdown on civil society since, by definition, civil society does not include any organization that refuses to comply with the interpretation of "the law" asserted by the government and the police. I heard a similar defense from the deans of Beijing's five major law schools when in 1992 they came to my hotel to protest a speech I had just made to the Foreign Correspondents Club condemning the PRC courts for becoming an instrument for suppressing the Chinese people. How could "a friend of China" make such an outrageous charge, they asked, since "counterrevolutionaries" were not within the definition of "the people"!
This latest HK case will accelerate the pressures on both the HK Bar and the courts. Ms. Chow, one of the people arrested, is a barrister who today was scheduled to defend one of the 47 human rights activists already being prosecuted for violating the new National Security Law. Her case and that of her newly-arrested colleagues raises critical legal issues. I assume that some fellow litigating lawyers, undeterred by the recent submission to political pressures of the HK Law Society composed of office lawyers, will present, as usual, a vigorous and able defense. What a challenge for the beleaguered judges!