Hong Kong judges ‘unfairly treated’ by some departing foreign ones, city leader says

Hong Kong’s leader said on Tuesday that local judges had been “unfairly treated” and “abandoned” by some of their colleagues from overseas after a third foreign judge resigned from the highest court in a week and one of them claimed the city was “slowly becoming a totalitarian state”.

Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu also stressed that non-interference in the judicial process had been “the DNA” of Hong Kong’s rule of law after two British judges and a Canadian colleague announced they were stepping down from the Court of Final Appeal.

“It is sad and disappointing that our [local] judges are abandoned by a few overseas counterparts and have been so unfairly treated by somebody with whom our judges used to serve our judicial system together,” he said.

Lee took aim at views that outgoing British judge Jonathan Sumption expressed in an op-ed piece the day before, in which he suggested that justices had to operate in an “impossible political environment created by China” which required “unusual courage” to “swim against such a strong political tide”.

The leader stressed that justices’ professional expertise “was not on politics”.

“A judge can like a particular system or dislike it,” he said. “He may also like a particular law or not, but his professional duty is to interpret and apply that particular piece of law in accordance with legal principles and evidence, whether he likes that law or not.”