By Jerome A. Cohen
It was recently announced that Carrie Lam has invoked an emergency ordinance to postpone the September Legislative Council (LegCo) elections by one year. This follows the disqualification of twelve opposition candidates earlier this week. But if the Hong Kong government was going to postpone the election, why bother to disqualify candidates? That seems an unnecessary addition to the challenges with which the HKG and its Beijing masters are confronting their people and the democratic world, since the disqualifications drew significant international condemnation. But the disqualification decisions should be seen as one further step in an unfolding campaign to establish Beijing’s new Hong Kong regime beyond peradventure.
There may well be more disqualifications, for example, even though the election has been postponed. That may be followed by a decision that current members of LegCo who have been disqualified for the next election will not be allowed to continue to serve in the newly-extended one-year LegCo term. Moreover, the reasons given for the disqualification of these candidates fit them easily into the categories of conduct now made criminally punishable by the National Security Law (NSL), especially inciting secession, subversion and foreign interference.
The latest statement of the PRC’s HK Liaison Office makes clear its felt need to entirely eliminate these supposedly unpatriotic people from the political process. So this may be the prelude to further prosecutions of democratic figures, not for relatively minor alleged violations of assisting in unlawful public assemblies prior to July 1, but for far more serious NSL crimes. Of course, as the HKG brazenly assures us, supposedly none of these actions in any way restricts the political freedoms of the HK people!
Furthermore, authorities have now released a wanted notice for six political figures outside HK who are suspected of inciting secession and colluding with foreigners to harm national security. What does this portend for their colleagues now in HK? Even those in HK who are barristers had better seek out local counsel specializing in the HK criminal process as now drastically altered by the NSL. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.