My Take | Why both sides get Benny Tai’s case wrong

Name: University of Hong Kong sacks Occupy leader Benny Tai
Uploaded: 2020-07-29T13:54:56.000Z
Duration: 2 min 13 s
Description: University of Hong Kong sacks Occupy leader Benny Tai

His teaching of civil disobedience is perfectly justified but his firing is not about academic interference, rather it’s the fact that he has been criminally convicted

Reading Time:2 minutes

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Benny Tai was sacked from his position of associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong. Photo: Nora Tam

Alex Lo

Published: 9:54pm, 29 Jul 2020Updated: 10:25pm, 29 Jul 2020

The University of Hong Kong has made the right decision to sack legal scholar and political activist Benny Tai Yiu-ting. No reputable public institution or private company should keep someone with a criminal conviction on staff. It’s as simple as that.

Tai was convicted and jailed for his part in the 2014 Occupy protests that he helped launch. But the drawn-out way university management went about with the firing has generated unnecessary controversy and allowed both sides – the yellow (anti-government) and the blue (pro-establishment) camps – to grandstand.

Let’s start with the blue camp. The standard argument is that Tai has no business teaching law to young people at the city’s oldest and most prestigious law school because he has been telling people and protesters to break the law, ostensibly to fight for greater democracy.

People who are committed to the rule of law must, first of all, follow it.

02:13

University of Hong Kong sacks Occupy leader Benny Tai

So far as I can tell, Tai has consistently advocated civil disobedience, rather than violent resistance. This means peacefully breaking laws or resisting a system that the activist considers unjust – in full knowledge that they face legal punishment, including jail.