The Inefficient Court

The first trial under the Beijing's imposed national security law has attracted overwhelming attention of the city. Today is the fourteenth day of the on-going trial. Discussions of the transcriptions have appeared in online media. The lengthy debates between the prosecutor and the expert witnesses have been most educational, and in a way quite entertaining*. The focus has been the meaning of the slogan "Liberate HK, revolution of our times" and its relation with separatism or independence, which is crucial to establishing the intention of the defendant in "inciting others to overthrow the regime", a speech crime allegedly committed by the 24-year-old suspect who carried a flag with the slogan in public. The world heard how the two professors analyzed the words in multi-dimensional contexts involving Chinese history, world history, linguistics, social science, media and communications, and even psychology. And the courtroom became a classroom where the professor explained to students (the humble judges, counsels, and spectators) the statistical concept of 'correlation coefficient' and how it was used to assess the correlation between the slogan and separatism.

Hong Kong is still lucky, having its court open and allowing debates to be heard by the public. Although conviction seems likely, based on the way this Beijing imposed 'law' is written, members of the public could still follow the trial and make their own judgement on this speech crime.

Very soon, the government will become impatient watching such trials and being embarrassed by the prosecutor's lack of better logic. When it has come to a point where this British style common law practice is no longer tolerable to Beijing or simply not efficient enough to achieve a 99% conviction rate, trials in Hong Kong will rapidly adopt the more efficient Chinese way: suspects will be arrested, denied bail by default, locked up, treated (in ways nobody knows exactly what happens), and made to publish an open confession admitting all alleged offences. Courts won't conduct open trials but claim to act according to the law. Of course, everything complies with the law. Members of the public would only need to be informed of the verdict.

Hong Kong will be ruled according to the law (依法辦事), though not necessarily abiding by the rule of law（法治).

July 15, 2021

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*第 14 日審訊　辯方專家證人李立峯繼續作供
**選櫻桃的人 – 譚蕙芸