On April 29, the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals against sentence of three defendants convicted of rioting and assaulting police in the Mong Kok riots during the Lunar New Year holiday in 2016 (CACC 164/2018). Edward Leung Tin-kei, Lo Kin-man and Wong Ka-kui had been sentenced to prison terms of six, seven, and three and a half years respectively. Leung and Lo had been convicted after a jury trial in the High Court in 2018, while Wong pleaded guilty.
At his first trial, on May 28, 2018, Leung was convicted of rioting in Argyle Street, but acquitted of inciting a riot, with the jury unable to reach a verdict on a charge of rioting in Portland Street. One of his co-defendants, Lam Lun-hing, was acquitted outright of three riot charges, while the jury could not reach a decision on the riot charges faced by Lee Nok-man and Lam Ngo-hin, although Lam was acquitted of an unlawful assembly.
When Leung was re-tried, the jury acquitted him, on March 22, 2019, of the Portland Street riot. His co-defendants, Lam Ngo-hin and Lee Nok-man, were also acquitted of their rioting charges, while Yung Wai-ip was convicted of three of the seven charges he faced. Quite clearly, the jury system worked well in both trials, and acquittals resulted in the cases where the prosecution had not proved guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
In the Court of Appeal, the chief judge of the High Court, Jeremy Poon Shiu-chor, said the trial judge had correctly imposed punitive and deterrent sentences on Leung, Lo and Wong, whose riotous conduct had an immediate and extremely serious impact on the rule of law. At trial, the evidence showed that the localist group, Hong Kong Indigenous, had flooded people into the area, after Food and Environmental Hygiene officers began a clearance operation against unlicensed hawkers. Hundreds of protesters set fires and threw bricks and wooden pallets at the police, with over 80 officers injured. The rioting, which was premeditated, also saw cars torched and public property damaged.
Although Wong and Li have obviously pulled the wool over the eyes of the BAME, things can still be put to rights. Any dispensation obtained in such circumstances is null and void, and justice must now be done
The trial judge, Anthea Pang Po-kam, described the conduct of the rioters as “organized violence”, and, quite clearly, no society would tolerate such behavior. It was, by any yardstick, a very serious case of its type, and exemplary sentences were fully justified. Indeed, Poon explained that “if public order is not protected, the rights and freedoms of citizens will be lost”.
Although the gravity of the rioting was blindingly obvious, as was the need to hold those responsible to account, it was blithely ignored by Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAME). Two of the accused rioters, Ray Wong Toi-yeung and Alan Li Tung-sing, having been granted bail, over the objections of prosecutors, then failed to appear for trial. They eventually surfaced in Germany in 2019, where they had been granted asylum the previous year.
Although the German authorities were tight-lipped about their actions, they were a calculated insult to Hong Kong and its rule of law. They were presumably hoodwinked by the two cowards, who would rather run away than face justice. To their credit, Leung and the other suspects attended their own trials, and placed their fate in the hands of the jury. Wong and Li, however, chose to run, an admission of guilt if ever there was one, and then bleated away about not being able to receive a fair trial, which, as anyone familiar with our jury system can attest, was a bare-faced lie.
On June 7, Wong sought to justify his flight by making various specious claims, and even placed reliance on the former governor, Chris Patten, a sure sign of desperation. In one of his regular paroxysms, Patten, ever the barrack-room lawyer, had claimed, in 2018, that the Public Order Ordinance (Cap 245), under which the rioters were charged, was in “direct contravention” of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as applied in Hong Kong through the Basic Law. On the back of this, Wong argued that “since we thought we could not have a fair trial, we had good reason to leave”.
What Patten, of course, had failed to point out was that anyone charged with a criminal offense can challenge its constitutionality before the courts. He also kept mum about the fact that, whenever the Public Order Ordinance has been challenged in the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, which currently includes three former presidents of the UK Supreme Court, its legitimacy has been validated. He also failed to explain why, if he disliked the riot offense so much, he did nothing about it during his governorship, when it was used against rioters in the Vietnamese refugee detention centers.
Quite why the German authorities fell for the duo’s deception is anybody’s guess, unless, of course, they bore animus toward Hong Kong, which they have denied. They have, however, not only misunderstood the judicial situation, but also their international obligations. As the 1951 Refugee Convention makes clear, a refugee is somebody who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”. Since Wong and Li fell into none of these categories, and were only being prosecuted because of their alleged involvement in street violence, their asylum claim was manifestly bogus.
Given, moreover, its diplomatic presence in Hong Kong, Germany should have known far better than to have opened its doors to local fugitives. As its consul general, Dieter Lamle, must appreciate, Hong Kong’s judiciary, buttressed by the Basic Law, is famed throughout Asia for its independence, professionalism and competence. Everybody charged with the Mong Kok riots received fair trials before juries, with some convicted and others acquitted, and Lamle will hopefully have explained all this to his superiors in Berlin. Indeed, according to the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2020, Hong Kong’s global ranking was 16th out of the 128 places surveyed, and even higher for criminal justice, where it came in at 14th.
Since they fled to Germany, Wong and Li have become familiar sights at anti-China events, often appearing under the auspices of the Green Party. When, for example, thanks to the UK’s Hong Kong Watch, student activists from the “Hong Kong Higher Institutions International Affairs Delegation”, led by the City University’s cretinous Joey Siu (of Tim Sebastian fame), visited Germany in September, to meet some China bashers at the Bundestag and malign Hong Kong, Wong was again on hand.
Although Wong and Li have obviously pulled the wool over the eyes of the BAME, things can still be put to rights. Any dispensation obtained in such circumstances is null and void, and justice must now be done. As the German authorities will have seen, the pair’s co-defendants received fair trials, at which the full extent of the violence and injury was revealed, and they can now see how flawed their decision was to grant them safe haven.
The Surrender of Fugitive Offenders Agreement between Hong Kong and Germany took effect on April 11, 2009. It makes provision for the return of criminal fugitives between the two places, subject to certain exceptions, none of which is applicable to Wong or Li. They stand accused of grave offenses of violence, and they must not be allowed to evade their just deserts. Germany, therefore, must rectify the situation, and revoke their refugee status. Nobody is above the law, and these criminal fugitives must be surrendered, so that justice can finally prevail.
The author is a senior counsel, law professor and criminal justice analyst, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
