Hong Kong must prosecute only non-political crimes committed during Occupy

I wonder how the relevant authorities in the police force and Department of Justice are going to handle the legal aftermath of the umbrella movement. Start with the scale of the problem: something over 100,000 people took part at one time or another in what was clearly an unauthorised gathering or series of gatherings. Are we going to take them all to court?

Apart from providing lucrative work for thousands of lawyers, this does not strike me as a particularly attractive option. Our judges and magistrates - however patriotic the famous white paper may have rendered them - are not going to have time to deal with anything else for the foreseeable future.

Single out the leaders? That may sound logical but it does throw up a whole range of issues. For a start, who were they? Obviously not Benny Tai Yiu-ting and his cohort, who proposed the original Occupy Central idea. After all, how can you be called a leader if no one followed you? Let's face it - that was how things turned out.

A plan for 10,000 middle-aged people to lay down in the Central business district, arms linked, to be carried away peaceably by the police, turned out to be something completely different, done somewhere else and by other people. By the time the exercise began, our learned professor had become more of a follower than an instigator.

The students, then? The heads of their organisations were on television every night and being quoted in newspapers every day. And they were wheeled out to debate with the government. They were certainly the face of the movement, but had they really planned in advance what took place? Frankly, what happened on the Friday night at the end of the student class-boycott week looked pretty spontaneous to me, and it involved ordinary members of the public showing their support for the demonstrating students.

And are we really proposing to begin the healing process - bridging the social divide that everyone has suddenly noticed and agrees needs to be addressed - by locking up the next generation? It sounds to me more like a recipe for prolonging the breakdown in relations.