Former Hong Kong Governor Lord Chris Patten video message Transcript
I know that this week in Hong Kong, thousands of people will be making their views clear, demonstrating against the proposals on extradition, which the government has put forward, extradition to China. It’s a proposal, or a set of proposals, which strike a terrible blow - I think - and so, I think to most people in Hong Kong and so does the international community, against the rule of law, against Hong Kong’s stability and security, against Hong Kong’s position as a great international trading hub. And the surprise is that the government in Hong Kong doesn’t seem to understand that. It does make you wonder sometimes who actually runs Hong Kong these days: is it the Hong Kong government or is it the joint liaison office acting on behalf of the communist regime in Beijing?
Why is this important? Well it’s the latest in a number of things that have happened in recent years which have tightened Beijing’s grip on Hong Kong, and which have profoundly worried people. I think for ten or a dozen years after 1997, things in Hong Kong went pretty well. Of course they could have gone better, I’m sorry that Beijing throttled the development of democracy, much against the promises that have been made earlier. But by and large, I think, Hong Kong remained a very free and successful society.
But ever since the regime in Beijing started to roll back Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the developments that have taken place under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji and Hu Jintao, and Wen Jiabao; ever since then, with the Party taking control over everything, cracking down on dissidents, cracking down on human rights, locking people up, incarcerating them in Xinjiang and so on. Ever since then, we know that Beijing has also been tightening its grip, or trying to, in Hong Kong. And I think that the latest proposals on extradition are an example of that.
Now a lot of very spurious arguments are put forward, it said that the present situation is a “loophole” which needs to be filled up - that’s absolute nonsense. People have known exactly why there shouldn’t be an extradition agreement with China for years, and many of the arguments put for the government’s proposals don’t actually pass the laugh-off-your-seat test. The argument that, well, it’s better to have an extradition treaty than to abduct people illegally from Hong Kong - are people really supposed to believe that?
Except for, but of course, Western democracies in Europe have extradition agreements with China, but they’re in a very different position to the position that Hong Kong is in. The reason why international chambers of commerce, why lawyers, why business around the world, why governments have raised their objections is very simple: because what these proposals do is to remove the firewall between Hong Kong’s rule of law and the idea of law - which prevails in Communist China - an idea of law where there aren’t any independent courts, where the courts and the security services and the party’s rules - which are, sometimes, pretty obscure - are rolled altogether. That’s why we’ve seen recently Canadian citizens that are locked up are taken as if it were hostage against things happening in Canada itself under the rule of law there. So it’s not surprising that people are so worried about what is happening.
I know that when people talk about the particular problem in relation to Taiwan, the leaders of the Hong Kong Bar Association over the last few years, I think a dozen of them, have put forward proposals which show how you could deal with that issue building on the existing common law.
So these proposals are bad for Hong Kong, they - I think - raise all sorts of questions which the government hasn’t even thought through, not least about Hong Kong’s economic importance and economic stability. We know very well that Hong Kong needs to be treated separately in economic and commercial matters from the rest of China. When I was governor a long time ago, I used to travel to Washington fairly regularly to argue the case for treating Hong Kong differently from, say, Shenzhen and Shanghai. But if you appear to be regarding Hong Kong from Beijing as though it was just another China city, then sooner or later, economic governments around the world, businesses around the world, when they’re looking even at things like the Belt and Road Initiative, they’re going to regard Hong Kong as just another part of China, and that would be really bad for the standard of living, for the quality of life in Hong Kong!
Above all, of course, if we go ahead, if the government goes ahead with this extradition agreement, it will cause unnecessary worries and anxieties in Hong Kong. That’s a really bad thing. I hope that even at this late stage, the government will back off and leave well alone. It doesn’t have to happen, it shouldn’t happen, and Hong Kong should carry on as a free society, under the rule of law, without having to worry about this extradition.
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發表於 2019-6-6 21:23:08
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