By Jerome A. Cohen
Activist Tam Tak-chi was arrested in September of this year
Here is an important Hong Kong Free Press essay on the case of activist Tam Tak-chi who was arrested in September of this year on a sedition charge. It is by Tom Kellogg and a Georgetown colleague who feels the need to adopt a pen name. Several points strike me as worth emphasizing.
One is how difficult it will be to maintain public attention and understanding as these HK prosecutions proliferate. Publicity about one case obscures developments in others. Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Ivan Lam were sentenced the same week that information about Tam’s case came out, and those cases drew attention away from Tam’s.
Moreover, as the Kellogg essay points out, it is increasingly difficult in practice to observe a distinction between prosecutions brought under regular Hong Kong laws and those now emerging under the new National Security Law. The Tam case is shocking in this respect. Tam is not being tried under the NSL. Yet the judge assigned to try his case is one of those judges on the tiny list of those sufficiently government-minded to be eligible to try NSL cases.
The denial of bail to Tam for the eight months before his scheduled trial means that he is already being severely punished for “crimes” for which he has not been convicted. Even the judge who inspires government confidence will have to contend with the presumption of innocence at trial and the further requirement that proof of conviction must be “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
It is troubling that Hong Kong criminal trials have distant trial dates while the accused are required to remain in jail. Jimmy Lai is also surely being punished during the long period before his trial, even though he too, at least in principle, may not be found guilty.
It is encouraging to see that some Hong Kong magistrates, despite the immense pressures that now descend on them, are still strictly putting the prosecution to its proof in accordance with the law. They undoubtedly will not be added to the list of approved national security judges.
Sadly, it is pathetic that pure speech, unlinked to acts or threats of violence, is now being punished in the name of “national security”, even if the speech is on college campuses. A Communist Party that used to preach the virtues of “criticism and self-criticism” is ridiculously fragile.