You are listening to part four of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China interview with Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. To listen to the other parts in this series, please check the links in the description.
William Saunders: Right. And I’m aware that certain British members — because Hong Kong was part of the Commonwealth. Anyway, some of those judges, several very prominent ones, have resigned over the last three, four, five, six months, because the judiciary is being corrupted.
Mark Clifford: Yeah. So it’s a very interesting point that you bring up. There’s a Court of Final Appeal which was replacing the Privy Council in London. It was designed to be a kind of supreme court. And I think it – with the best of intentions – they wanted to make sure that this Court of Final Appeal was up to date with the latest legal thinking, in Commonwealth countries.
And so, there’s a provision in the Basic Law, that mini-constitution, that foreign judges can sit on the court. And so there are typically around a dozen or so. There’s been a lot of pressure and… I’m the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong foundation, and we came out with a report in May, and whether it was our report or not, a number of judges have resigned since then.
I think five have resigned this year. There’s still a handful from the UK and from Australia. And I think it’s reprehensible. I think that, although some of them have ruled on cases relating to Jimmy Lai or political prisoners, some have not.
I think that the idea that they’re somehow, that their special expertise is somehow pushing Hong Kong in a better direction is belied by the facts on the ground. Whatever kind of legal theories and stories they can tell themselves are not consonant with the reality of a place that’s put 1,900 people behind bars on political charges in the last five years, that’s charged 10,000 people on political charges, that has over 3,000 people in its prisons on political charges who have not been convicted.
So think of that: 3,000 people just being held on bail.
W: Right. I’m a lawyer, and one of the basic human rights that’s in every document from the universal declaration forward is the right to a trial and the right…
M: A speedy trial. And justice delayed is justice denied.
W: Yeah, because [they], I mean, keep people in jail forever.
M: So here… Yeah, so here’s just a small example, if I can interject here. Besides Jimmy’s arrest, there were six other people from Apple Daily who were arrested in that summer of 2020. I mean, there were some arrested then let out in August 2020 in the first national security law arrest. In the summer of 2021 six other people were arrested and have been held since that time.
So about three and a half years, despite the fact that all have pled guilty, but their sentencing is somehow being held hostage to Jimmy Lai’s trial. Now, three of them testified against Jimmy. Unfortunate. Although in at least one case, it basically seemed to help Jimmy. You know, there just doesn’t seem to be a lot there.
But the point is, you have six people who’ve pled guilty. They don’t know if they’re going to be in for another week or the rest of their lives.
W: Yeah, yeah. It’s all the whim of the powerful. So it’s the opposite of the rule of law. Rule of law means law; everybody’s subject to the same law. It’s not the powerful get one outcome and the powerless get another. So it’s a mockery. It’s a farce.
It’s almost like the show trials, kind of, they had in the Soviet Union. They’re not real.
M: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. These are totally show trials. You know, we’ve got this expression about a kangaroo court, but, I don’t know, it seems like a slur on kangaroos to me because, you know, what they’re doing here is… It’s a joke. And, you know, I have to say, you know, people kind of ask me, “What happened?”
I mean, a lot of things went wrong in Hong Kong, in terms of the power, the ruling elite, business, and especially government not holding the line. But if I have to blame one single group of people, I mean, except for the chief executive and the cabinet members, you have to blame the judges, because the judges have twisted and distorted the law in case after case to make new law, to be able to convict somebody.
This issue of incitement to riot that I mentioned earlier, a guy is holding a candle and saying a prayer, and he’s convicted on incitement to riot. And the judge’s reasoning was, “Well, you’re famous. You knew if you went there that you might inspire other people.” There was no riot anyway.
But, you know, just the fact that somebody bears… they bear silent witness, and that’s incitement to riot. Or this issue I mentioned about… Jimmy Lai is serving five years and nine months for a lease violation. He sublet a place that was about half the size of one half of a tennis court in the context of a huge newspaper building.
He paid rent on it because… his private company sublet it from the publicly traded company which had leased it on a long term lease from the government. And the government — I was on the board — they’re writing us these threatening letters. We have to give everything up. We violated the National Security law.
“You’ve broken this lease.” Come on, you know, rent was paid, but somehow permission wasn’t received from the government. It would be like, I rent an apartment from you and it says no pets and I have a cat in there, and you decide you’re going to throw me in jail for five years and nine months.
I mean… And as I said, it was never a criminal charge. This is a civil matter. In Hong Kong, they somehow manipulate, moved it up to a higher court where you’re able to turn it into a criminal charge. They gave him six years. They gave him three months off for good behavior or something.
I mean, you see, case after this, and it’s not just Jimmy. These 45 people have been held on, again, these subversion and sedition charges because they had an election primary? I could go on and on. Jimmy’s two sons from his first marriage, they’re into their… They were born in the 1970s, so almost 50 years old.
They don’t have anything to do with his political operations or issues. When he was first arrested on national security law charges, they were arrested too. Now they’ve never been formally charged, and yet they have to keep reporting to the police. They can’t travel freely. If they travel, they usually have their mother act as the guarantor.
I asked her, “Well, what if they don’t come back? What are the Chinese [going to do?]” She goes, “They’re communists. They’ll do whatever they want to me.” I mean, that’s the world that we’re living in. This is a place that had rule of law. It was different from the rest of China because you didn’t have to worry about the midnight knock on the door.
You didn’t have to worry about your assets being seized. And when this company was shut down, it was worth $100 million. Jimmy owned about 70% of it. So that’s $70 million he’s just lost from his pocket. It’s supposedly being liquidated. We don’t know what’s happening. There’s a lot of cash there.
There were loans that Jimmy had made that weren’t repaid. You know, they’re taking hundreds of millions of dollars away from it.
W: It’s almost like a criminal enterprise.
M: It’s sure moving in that direction.
W: You know, the famous talk was, you’d have two systems, they’d both be part of China, but you’d have two systems. One would be the government controlled economy and one would be the free economy of Hong Kong. But the communist officials just couldn’t take, like we said, any relatively little bit of… I mean they couldn’t take even a little bit of criticism.
They’re still getting… There’s still tons of money coming in and everything. They could have let Hong Kong keep going, but they were just so afraid of any freedom.
M: You know, it’s so ironic. What people originally wanted when this started, you know, 27 years ago or a little more now, I guess. They wanted to be able to elect their mayor, the chief executive, and they wanted to be able to elect the city council, the legislative council.
The fact that someone like an Anson Chan, who’s the first Chinese and the first woman to be the chief secretary — it’s the number two job in Hong Kong — the fact that she probably would have easily won an election against a… she’s a product of the British colonial system, would have been absolutely loyal to China, but did actually have some principles.
They were so frightened at the idea that somebody like Anson Chan, who’s like just, I mean, I just don’t know how to say it enough. She’s a technocratic, bureaucratic person who’s trained in the British system and has principles, things like universal values. They couldn’t handle somebody like that.
So you just think: how afraid is a country of 1.4 billion people, the world’s second largest economy, and it couldn’t have a little place of 7 million people on its periphery that was used to freedom, couldn’t elect the mayor, couldn’t elect a city council; I mean, what are they so afraid of?
W: They’re afraid of the universal values.
M: So I want to just. Actually I’ve been sounding very negative, but I do want to, before we finish, talk about a little… There is another side and that’s that 6 out of 10 people in Hong Kong always voted for pro democracy candidates from 1991 when they had the first elections, territory wide elections under British rule, until 2019 after the protests when these district council elections were swept by the democracy camp.
So 6 out of 10, give or take a bit, support democracy. I believe that when Hong Kong people have the chance, and I do believe they’ll get the chance again, they will be able to express themselves freely, and they’ll be able to work towards democracy openly, freely. I don’t know when that’s going to happen.
I don’t know how. But I mean I think it’s in the Hong Kong DNA. I also have to say that I think we’re approaching the end of the beginning in terms of Jimmy’s ordeal. I think we need to see this trial finish. We need to wait for the inevitable guilty verdict and a trial and a sentence that, whether it’s 10 years or it’s life, is effectively a life sentence if it’s carried out for a 76 year old guy.
And then we need to ensure that we really ramp up the political tempo. So Jimmy is a British citizen, another reason he could have left. He’s never traveled on Chinese travel documents since he had a one-way permit to Macau in 1961 as a 12-and-a-half year old.
He’s not a dual citizen, yet the Chinese have denied consular access for Britain. We need to continue to have Britain and the British Prime Minister and others speak up and work on behalf of their citizen, Jimmy Lai. I was delighted to see Prime Minister Keir Starmer bring up Jimmy Lai and his unjust incarceration to Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping at the G20 meeting.
That’s good. I was very encouraged to hear candidate now President-elect Donald Trump say that it’s 100% guaranteed that he would get Jimmy Lai out. It was going to be easy and we need to have people working on it. So we intend to use that high level commitment to work.
We have offices. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong foundation has offices in London and in D.C. and we have great engagement and support from a broad range of parliamentarians and members of Congress. This is one of these issues that cuts across party lines and we intend to continue working with the government.
It’s not up to me or even anybody in the UK or the US. It’s ultimately up to Xi Jinping. But I think he has to understand, there is an off ramp. If he really is genuine about wanting better relations, especially with the new administration in the US and in the UK, I can think of almost nothing that has a lower cost and a higher potential payback from him than letting Jimmy Lai and some other political prisoners out of Hong Kong.
If he can ease things a little; you know, again, it’s not for me to… I’m not going to be negotiating or anything. But, you know, there are sanctions on people like John Lee. And, you know, maybe some of those sanctions come off. I mean, we have seen some movement, on the part of the Chinese.
They’ve just let Pastor David Lin return a couple of months ago, who had been unjustly detained in China. They’ve now just released three more Americans who were unjustly detained. We’ve seen some really creative diplomacy on the part of the Biden administration with Evan Gershkovich and that big swap that saw 24 people freed, or some of them went back to Russia.
I don’t know if that’s free, but 16 get out of Russia. So look, there’s room for movement. History throws up many strange twists and turns and surprises, and we’ve just got to make the most of the opportunities in the opening we have. And I think we’ve laid a good groundwork with the Biden administration.
I think we’re going to just keep working harder with our allies in Congress and in the incoming administration.
W: Yeah. We have to work for Jimmy and for the other folks there, and just for freedom generally, and for freedom for the people in China. I mean, we have Guangcheng, his lawyer was Gao Zhijiang, who in the early part of… after 2000, there were lawyers working on human rights in China before they were crushed by the Communists.
And Gao has disappeared into the black jails. And the communists even say he’s been released. Anyway, I mention him because for many Chinese, he’s considered kind of Mr. Human Rights, and we don’t know where he is. So we got to get Jimmy out, we got to work for those other folks.
We just have to stand for freedom and universal values against totalitarianist gangster communism.
M: But they know they’re weak and that’s why they’re so afraid. They know it could crumble at any moment, but they are gangsters. They’ve got a lot of technology, they have a lot of power, they have a lot of ruthless determination. And we just need to keep using our universal human values and everything as our tool, and I think people’s ultimate basic quest for freedom.
W: Yeah. Well, thank you for being on the Barefoot Lawyer podcast.
M: I’m honored, and it’s been a real pleasure to have this wide ranging conversation.
W: Yeah, thank you very much.
The Center for Human Rights is hosting a student essay contestant with a grand prize of $4,000. To learn more, please visit our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.