By Jerome A. Cohen
I was asked by a journalist about Martin, and thought I should share what I know about this outstanding lawyer/advocate.
Martin Lee
I have known Martin slightly and admired him hugely for decades as both a lawyer and public figure and have seen him on his recent visits to the US, often accompanied by Anson Chan and on the latest visit by Jimmy Lai. On his last visit to NY I invited him and Jimmy Lai to speak at the round table that I run at the Council on Foreign Relations concerning US Foreign Policy and the Rule of Law in Asia. Martin, even at 80, was a tiger.
Here’s an anecdote about Martin that may be an instructive one today, given the current struggle over the Basic Law. Not long after the 1997 Handover, I was speaking at a business conference in Shanghai and, to my surprise, was invited by Hong Kong’s first Chief Executive, C.H. Tung, to have breakfast with him. I had only had one previous conversation with CH but we had a good mutual friend. CH is a likeable person and was a strong supporter of improving relations between the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where I then directed Asian studies, and Hong Kong. We both had been enthusiastic about the idea of setting up a CFR branch in Hong Kong but that idea didn’t make progress once, in our previous conversation, I told CH that CFR was open to people of different viewpoints and that Martin Lee would certainly be eligible for membership in a Hong Kong branch. CH made clear that the prospect of Martin’s membership diminished his enthusiasm for the proposal.
Despite that initial disappointment, at our Shanghai breakfast, I thought I would try out another useful idea on CH.
The Basic Law provides for a Basic Law Committee (BLC) to advise the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) on its responsibility for interpreting the Basic Law. Its twelve members, six from Hong Kong and six from the Mainland, include legal experts from both jurisdictions. It was unclear, however, what role the BLC was actually to play. One possibility was that it might have been developed into a serious public tribunal for recommending appropriate interpretations of the Basic Law to the NPCSC, following procedures analogous to those of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the House of Lords that had been the highest authority for dealing with UK constitutional questions relating to Hong Kong while Hong Kong was a colony. The BLC might have established a practice of holding judicial-type hearings, preferably in public, at which varying aspects of the Basic Law issues in question might be adequately ventilated by legal and policy experts before the BLC made its recommendations to the NPCSC. Indeed, I suggested, a custom could even be established by the NPCSC whereby it accepted the BLC recommendations. Such an implementation of the Basic Law would maximize the confidence of Hong Kong’s people that the Basic Law would be properly interpreted and the Sino-British Joint Declaration properly carried out in accordance with the legitimate expectations generated by the language of those documents.
CH patiently heard my suggestion but then immediately responded: ”Ah, that would only give Martin Lee and his kind an opportunity to make more trouble.”
I was disappointed because it seemed evident that the key to the success of One Country, Two Systems would be the arrangements for faithful interpretation of the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. The BLC could have become an important vehicle for building confidence that NPCSC decisions would not be merely the product of secret, political Beijing backrooms, but of a transparent, legitimate process that fulfilled the expectations generated by the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. This is what is at stake as we await the results of the NPCSC deliberations that will determine the content of the forthcoming national security legislation for Hong Kong. Will the BLC even be consulted and at what stage of the process that has been going on for some time? Martin Lee, it should be noted, was not designated to be one of the Hong Kong members of the BLC. So much for troublemakers!