Patten does need a rule of law lesson

Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, defended his meddling in Hong Kong affairs all these years with a speech on Tuesday at a reception at the United Kingdom House of Commons marking the 21st anniversary of the end of British rule in Hong Kong. Speaking in his capacity as a founder of a group called Hong Kong Watch, he repeated the claim that Hong Kong still is Britain’s responsibility one way or another and he needed no lecture on the rule of law from people like Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Although he did not mention Lam by name, it is obvious he was referring to a recent comment she made in response to his criticism of the way a Hong Kong court handled a criminal case involving a few “localist activists” accused of rioting in violent protests known as the Mong Kok riot in February 2016 in violation of the Public Order Ordinance.

The British career politician has been fixated with preserving his Hong Kong legacy in the past 21 years, particularly the opposition camp he helped build through a “democratic reform” drive in violation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The Public Order Ordinance, which was originally designed to handle social unrest in the 1960s, would apparently no longer be useful after the roles of “violator” and “enforcer” were switched. That is why he had the Public Order Ordinance revised in the 1990s — after China and Britain signed the Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong in 1984 — but the provisional legislature restored the original version in 1997 in accordance with the Joint Declaration.

Patten is upset about the unchanged Public Order Ordinance because it still serves its purpose today but against unlawful behavior of certain individuals he supports. In order to prove himself right, he chose to ignore the fact that those “activists” broke existing law and focus instead on faulting Hong Kong’s judiciary for upholding the rule of “an obsolete law”. Considering that he attended Oxford University and has a degree in modern history, there is no need to wonder if he knows what rule of law means or how it works. The question is how he would like the Public Order Ordinance to be changed, if not abolished? How about the use of violence by anti-government rioters and bodily harm and damage to public and private properties they caused? Should Hong Kong make a law legalizing such behavior, in the name of complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights no less? Is that how the rule of law should be in Hong Kong according to Patten?