Amnesty International (AI) was founded in 1961. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, it claims to have over 10 million members and supporters worldwide. Its mission is to campaign for “a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments”, which sounds laudable.
In its early days, AI focused on prisoners of conscience and then branched out into other areas, including miscarriages of justice and torture cases. It also seeks to mobilize public opinion and pressurize governments. In 1977, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “having contributed to securing the ground for freedom, for justice, and thereby also for peace in the world”.
Alas, as standards have fallen the halcyon days have become a distant memory. It is all too often in the news nowadays for incorrect reporting, associating with dubious organizations, and ideological and foreign policy bias. And it has only itself to blame, as its China hostile stances have shown.
Although the fees being paid to the “international legal team” of the former media magnate, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, who is being tried in Hong Kong on national security and sedition charges, are unknown, they must be colossal. It has nothing to do with Lai’s legal team in Hong Kong, and is led by Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC (“international counsel for Mr Jimmy Lai and Mr Sebastien Lai”), and includes Jonathan Price, Tatyana Eatwell, Jennifer Robinson, and Sarah Dobbie. They all belong to London’s Doughty Street Chambers, where they rub shoulders with the likes of the Hong Kong Watch patron, Baroness (Helena) Kennedy KC (who participated in the notorious “Uyghur Tribunal” in 2021, as “external advisor”), and the unlamented former Hong Kong Bar Association chairman, Paul Harris SC (who did a runner in 2022, for reasons best known to himself).
Indeed, Gallagher has associated herself with some of the UK’s most rabid China critics, naively imagining this would somehow advance Lai’s cause. On Dec 12, 2023, for example, she shared a platform at Westminster with Lord (David) Alton (a Hong Kong Watch patron infamous for his involvement in 2021 in the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s inquiry into the Hong Kong Police Force, financed by Stand with Hong Kong), Mark Sabah (the UK-based director of the US-backed Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, run by Lai’s former employee, Mark Clifford), and Benedict Rogers (the serial fantasist who co-founded Hong Kong Watch, the anti-China hate machine). She used the occasion to call on the British authorities to “demand that Jimmy Lai is released immediately” (just as the United States had done). Although this was delusional, as everybody present must have realized, she presumably felt she had to sing for her supper.
To justify their fees, Gallagher’s team (which also represents Lai’s son, Sebastien), fires off broadsides in all directions on his behalf. Like unwanted callers, they regularly bang on doors at the United Nations, invariably to no avail. On Sept 12, for example, in a blaze of publicity, they sought the intervention of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Edwards, albeit on spurious grounds. Although they complained about Lai undergoing solitary confinement while in detention (even though he spends many days in court), they did not mention that he has himself, according to informed sources, chosen to be separated from the general prison population for reasons of his own.
Although Gallagher’s team led Edwards to believe Lai was being denied “independent medical care”, it failed to point out that all detainees are treated equally, and that nobody is denied the medical treatment they need. Indeed, the Prison Rules (Cap.234A) require the Correctional Services Department to ensure that necessary and appropriate medical services are provided to everybody in its care. Moreover, the Rules stipulate that the “Medical Officer shall have the medical charges and shall be responsible for the treatment when sick of all prisoners” (Rule 143 (a)).
Every correctional institution has a hospital or sick bay where medical services are provided by Medical Officers seconded from the Department of Health and correctional staff with professional nursing qualifications. Anybody who requires specialist treatment, intensive care or surgery will receive treatment in public hospitals and Lai is no exception. However, in her desperation to sensationalize his situation, Gallagher disclosed none of this to Edwards, and that was not all.
She also announced that Lai faced the “grossly disproportionate threat of imposition of a life sentence on conviction for entirely peaceful acts”. If she had studied the case (as one assumes she must have), she would have known this flew in the face of the evidence adduced against her client. The prosecution has based its case not on “entirely peaceful acts”, but on what it alleges is collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security (and a lesser charge of conspiracy to publish seditious material). The crux of its case is that Lai, under “the guise of fighting for freedom and democracy”, requested foreign countries, notably the US, to engage in hostile activities against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and China, intending to harm both.
Although this was not explained to her, Edwards, an Australian lawyer who once worked for AI, appears to have realized that an attempt was being made to pull the wool over her eyes, and her response has been muted (so far, at least).
Be that as it may, when Gallagher sought to enlist AI’s assistance for her campaign, she was pushing on an open door. It regularly traduces Beijing on every issue under the sun and is always looking for new opportunities, however fantastical. For example, on Sept 25, 2023, its UK chief executive, Sacha Deshmukh, announced that “Hong Kong’s notorious national security law should be repealed as a matter of urgency”. Thereafter, its China director, Sarah Brooks, on Jan 23, accused the Chinese authorities of “presenting their suppression of Uyghurs as an effective counter to terrorism and their suppression of civic space in Hong Kong as providing stability in the city”.
In other words, AI is only too happy to regurgitate whatever propaganda it is fed by the West’s anti-China lobbies, no matter how preposterous. This suited Gallagher down to the ground, and she played AI like a trout.
When she invited AI to label Lai as a “prisoner of conscience”, it eagerly obliged, on Oct 2. However, this was bizarre, as Lai failed to satisfy its criteria. AI classifies a prisoner of conscience as somebody who is detained “solely because of his/her political, religious or other conscientiously held beliefs”, and by no stretch of the imagination could Lai be said to fall into this category (as anybody who had heard the evidence presented against him at trial would have known).
Even though she had cynically engineered it, Gallagher greeted AI’s announcement like manna from heaven. She declared that Lai was “imprisoned for his peaceful campaigning activities, his writing and his journalism”. This can only have been said tongue-in-cheek, as her client’s imprisonment is fraud related. He was sentenced to five years’ and nine months’ imprisonment on Dec 10, 2022, for two fraud charges involving a lease, and the sooner Gallagher levels with the world the better it will be for her credibility.
Although Lai is due to open his defense case in the High Court on Nov 20, Gallagher declared that “concerted, strategic and urgent action must now be taken by the UK and other countries to secure his release”. By any yardstick, this was a crude attempt to interfere with ongoing criminal proceedings in Hong Kong, and, as such, an affront to the rule of law. If this type of conduct is now regarded as acceptable in legal circles in the UK, so be it, but it is very sad to see in a jurisdiction that was once revered as the cradle of the law.
However, Hong Kong remains a bastion of common law values, enshrined in its Basic Law (Art.8). Lai is receiving a fair trial, and will only be convicted if guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt. If convicted, he can appeal to the Court of Appeal, where he can also be assured of a fair hearing (he must have been delighted last year when the appeal judges quashed his conviction for organizing an unauthorized assembly, because the trial judge had misapprehended the evidence, something Gallagher conveniently downplays).
Since 1997, the executive branch of the government has always respected the independence of the Judiciary and prosecutors and protected the legal system from outside pressures. Once trials are underway, nothing and nobody is allowed to derail them, not even Gallagher. Lai himself must realize this, and hopefully, the day will come when Gallagher also will be able to get her head around this self-evident truth.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
