Hong Kong braced for rare strikes and further protests amid an escalating standoff over a controversial bill that would allow extraditions to mainland China.
Local companies said they would suspend work or allow flexible office hours today to accommodate workers planning to demonstrate near the territory’s Legislative Council (Legco), which is to meet to debate amendments.
The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, a pro-democracy labor group, and several student associations urged members to join the strike and reprise a protest Sunday that drew of hundreds of thousands.
The Legco was expected to gather at about 12 noon to consider changes proposed by opposition lawmakers. The body’s leader closed off the area outside the chamber — a popular protest site known as the Drum — after scuffles in that area early on Monday morning.
Opponents want Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) to withdraw the legislation and threatened to organize a bigger, general strike on Monday next week to keep up the pressure.
“We are calling on Hong Kong people to come and join our protest rally right outside LegCo,” opposition lawmaker Claudia Mo (毛孟靜) said at a news conference with other protest organizers. “When we will call this off is up to Carrie Lam. If she doesn’t scrap this controversial extradition bill, Hong Kongers will fight on.”
Lam canceled a monthly legislative question-and-answer session that was to take place at 11am.
Her popularity fell to its lowest rating since she took power in 2017, according to a survey by Hong Kong University’s Public Opinion Programme.
The poll, which was taken before Sunday’s protests, saw her approval rating plunge to a record low 43 points, down from 64 points the week she assumed office.
Hong Kong-listed Most Kwai Chung said in a Facebook post that it would close business for the day, because “Hong Kong is sick” and they “wish Hong Kong will get well soon.”
Law firm Vidler & Co Solicitors said it had notified all employees that “in the event they wished to act in accordance with their conscience” and not attend work today to go on strike against the bill, the firm would support their actions.
While the potential scale of the strike was difficult to assess, one unconfirmed list of participating companies circulating online had grown to 1,000 mostly local firms by late afternoon. People claiming to be airline crews and teachers urged strikes in their own organizations online.
A number of the almost 1,400 multinational corporations with regional offices in Hong Kong, such as the global accounting company Deloitte, gave employees the option of working from home or at offices away from the protest site.
Hong Kong’s government is working to pass the law, which would for the first time allow extraditions with mainland China, before the end of the current legislative session ends next month.
Critics say the proposal risks undermining the autonomy China guaranteed Hong Kong before handover, as well as its status as a global financial center, while the government says it needs to prevent the territory from becoming a haven for fugitives.
Although the legislation was expected to easily pass the city’s legislature, which is dominated by Beijing loyalists, the opposition had introduced scores of amendments to undermine or slow the proposal’s approval.
Hong Kong Legco President Andrew Leung (梁智鴻) set aside almost 70 hours of debate, ending on Thursday next week.
The US on Monday expressed “grave concern” over the legislation, raising pressure on Lam and her backers on the mainland.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Geng Shuang (耿爽) yesterday reaffirmed the government’s support for the extradition legislation and urged the US to “exercise caution in its words and deeds and stop interfering in Hong Kong’s affairs and China’s internal affairs.”
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the