Patten pontificates with more stuff and nonsense

sought to shock his listeners by mentioning last November’s United Nations review session on China, when seven countries made recommendations concerning Hong Kong. They were not told, however, that the recommendations were, for the most part, generalized and routine.

They concerned, for example, such things as Croatia’s suggestion that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - which was adopted in Hong Kong in 1994, during Patten’s own governorship - should be implemented through local laws, something Patten himself failed to do while in office.

In that same context, he also made no mention of the government’s laudable creation last June of the Commission on Children, which is specifically charged with promoting child rights in Hong Kong.

Although Patten obviously hoped to alarm the committee, by announcing that things had changed in Hong Kong, he failed to explain that many of the changes have actually been for the better, yielding real improvements. He could, for example, have explained that the Legislative Council is now far more democratic than it was during his own governorship, with half its members being directly elected from the geographical constituencies, but he kept this information to himself.

His listeners, moreover, were not told that Hong Kong people could, for the first time, have directly elected their chief executive in 2017, had not short-sighted members of the LegCo torpedoed the proposal for their own selfish purposes.

By any yardstick, Patten’s was a dismal performance. By placing a sinister interpretation on recent developments in Hong Kong and not fully explaining things, he obviously hoped to give China a bad name. However, given the flaws in his analysis, he has only succeeded in discrediting himself.