Скачать или смотреть Sharon Hom on Police Brutality & the Status of Prosecutions in Hong Kong

Source:    • Hearing on Hong Kong’s Summer of Disconten...  

20190917 Hearing on Hong Kong’s Summer of Discontent and U S Policy Responses (CECC)

Transcript:

Mr Chris Smith:

It deeply concerns me that we just keep not learning the lessons. Nancy Pelosi, Frank Wolf, David Bonior and I all opposed MFN for China after Tiananmen Square. George Herbert Walker Bush thought he could manage the whole thing. It was our ambassador to China and as it turned out we managed it extraordinarily poorly. Bill Clinton came in and he said, "Let's link human rights with MFN trade." One year later, he de-linked it. The lesson learned by the dictatorship in Beijing was: profits trumped human rights.

We now - and I've tried for five years – (are trying to) get my bill passed. (Or) OUR bill, it's a collected bill, House and Senate, bipartisan. The same people who said, "Just trade more, and somehow China will matriculate from dictatorship to democracy." have been proven wrong again. If it wasn't for the great people of Hong Kong standing up so powerfully at great loss of their of their liberty (going to prison, being arrested, being harassed, and even killed and tortured. This Congress needs to wake up and say, "Finally at long last we're going to put conditionality on this." So if you want to speak to that, I'd appreciate it. There have been a thousand arrests since the activities occurred. What is the status of the prosecutions? Joshua, we know your case but there are many other cases that are in obscurity right now. What has happened to those individuals? And just generally on the police. Are the police largely new recruits, who are more ideologically aligned with Beijing? Or are they the old hands who have just now become even more repressive than they had been in the past? If you can speak to those things, I'd appreciate it.

Shaon Hom:

The prosecution is related to not only the imposition of the public order ordinance – it has to be an unlawful assembly – but also the way in which the notice-of-no-objection process contributes to that. That's the tool and the tool is Hongkongers have to face this ridiculous situation where they have to have the police deny the application for a notice of no objection for a group for a peaceful assembly that is to protest police violence. So you have the police denying the notice of no assembly, therefore making it an unlawful assembly, you know, an assembly that is to protest police violence. So it's really important that through this kind of misuse of that process, they are really violating international standards for peaceful assembly by imposing this kind of unduly restrictive administrative procedure. The police under this procedure then can act rampantly as both enforcement, prosecutor (It's because they're naming this, saying this is a riot. But a riot is a legal process. It's for the court to look at the evidence. It's for the court to see if this person engaged in illegal behavior and violent.. etc.) So right now the police are acting as enforcement prosecution and executioner of orders. That is part of the problem we're looking at. On top of that, we have politicized decision-making by the prosecution. This was also noted by independent UN experts maybe 2 years ago saying that they were concerned about a potential pattern of politicized decisions that were being made in who to prosecute and who to pursue.