Two exiled Hong Kong democracy advocates, who in 2017 dramatically skipped bail and fled the territory via Taiwan after being charged with rioting offenses, last week revealed to Reuters that they have been granted asylum in Germany.
“We have become the first two political refugees [from Hong Kong] in Europe,” 27-year-old Alan Li (李東昇) said in a telephone interview.
Li and 25-year-old Ray Wong (黃台仰) are former members of Hong Kong Indigenous, a group that advocated independence from China. That two Hong Kongers have gained asylum in a European nation should be a wake-up call for the international community.
It is welcome news, but it marks a fresh low for the former British colony. The situation is even bleaker when taken together with the controversial amendments proposed for Hong Kong’s extradition laws, which threaten to severely diminish the territory’s judicial independence.
Li and Wong were charged with rioting linked to the “fishball revolution” — a protest that turned violent in February 2016 in Kowloon’s Mongkok area.
Li told Reuters that he and Wong were granted asylum in May last year. The two had been keeping a low profile, but decided to break their silence due to the proposed extradition changes, which they believe would allow Beijing to suppress dissidents and democracy campaigners.
Hong Kong’s final British governor agrees. In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Chris Patten said that the proposed law would be a breach of the Joint Declaration signed by the UK and China, an internationally recognized treaty lodged with the UN.
It is the “worst thing” to happen to Hong Kong since the 1997 handover and would destroy the “firewall” that exists between China’s and Hong Kong’s legal systems, Patten said.
Under the existing system, extradition requests must be scrutinized by the Hong Kong Legislative Council, but, if promulgated, the amendments would give Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) the authority to issue an extradition certificate after receiving a request from the Hong Kong Security Bureau. A judge would then decide, behind closed doors, whether to grant an arrest warrant.
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp has accused its government of using a high-profile murder case, involving a Hong Kong citizen accused of murdering his girlfriend while on holiday in Taiwan last year, to introduce a “Trojan horse” legal amendment that would allow the extradition of Hong Kong residents to not just Taiwan, but also Macau and China.
Given the long list of arrests of democracy campaigners on trumped-up charges — including “Umbrella movement” advocates Joshua Wong (黃之鋒), Nathan Law (羅冠聰) and Alex Chow (周永康) — and the extrajudicial abduction of Hong Kong booksellers to China in 2015, why would Hong Kongers believe that their government — on orders from its masters in Beijing — would not abuse its powers?
More than ever, the wheels are falling off Hong Kong’s “one country two, systems” model — which Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) attempted to sell to Taiwanese in his Jan. 2 speech.
In the Bloomberg interview, Patten hit the nail on the head: “People talk about China’s role in the 21st century, but the Chinese have yet to prove that we can trust them. And if they break their word over Hong Kong, where are we going to trust them?”
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