Report to US Congress on HK distorted, inaccurate

that Yuen disregarded misconduct by police officers, this will come as a big surprise to the seven police officers imprisoned for beating up a protester.

Equality before the law is the very essence of Hong Kong’s legal system, and applies irrespective of the status of particular offenders. Nobody is above the law, as events have shown. In recent times, both the former chief executive, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, and the former chief secretary, Rafael Hui Si-yan, have been imprisoned for misbehavior in public office. This vividly demonstrates that, in Hong Kong, justice is blind. However, this information was not disclosed to Congress by the CRS, although they have certainly not hoodwinked everyone.

In the World Economic Forum global competitiveness ranking for 2017-18, Hong Kong is ranked 13th in the judicial independence category, well ahead of the US, which came 25th out of the 137 places surveyed. This was entirely merited, as Hong Kong’s judges decide cases impartially, without fear or favor. As the Hong Kong Bar Association and Law Society emphasized in a joint statement in 2017, judges adjudicate “solely according to law”. The Basic Law, moreover, provides for the maintenance of the common law and trial by jury, and citizens aggrieved by official decisions can challenge them by judicial review, as often happens, although the CRS disregards this.

Instead, the CRS projects a wholly negative view of Hong Kong developments, hoping thereby to blacken China. Although the CRS tells Congress that the Chinese central government has resisted democratic reforms in Hong Kong, it does not disclose that, since 1997, Hong Kong people have enjoyed far more democracy than they did in the colonial era, with 50 percent of the legislature now being directly elected from the geographical constituencies.

The reason voters could not, for the first time, directly elect their chief executive in 2017, was that anti-government forces combined, for their own selfish reasons, to block the government’s electoral reform package in 2015. However, even the existing chief executive election mechanism, under which a representative election committee of 1,200 voters decides, is infinitely more democratic than its predecessor, whereby a governor was simply chosen by the British prime minister of the day.

The US consul general in Hong Kong, Kurt Tong, recently described the USHong Kong relationship as “very good”, and he was right. Both places, after all, respect the rule of law and operate successful capitalist systems. It would be a tragedy if these good relations were to be imperiled by the prejudiced reporting of the CRS.