Jailing of Hong Kong Occupy trio a ‘serious threat’ to city’s rule of law, top foreign lawyers say in joint letter
The 12 say city’s judiciary risks being a ‘charade at the beck and call of the Communist Party’
They also said that under a white paper released by Beijing in 2014, Hong Kong’s independent judiciary “risks becoming a charade, at the beck and call of the Chinese Communist Party”.
Joshua Wong and other jailed Hong Kong student leaders see political careers halted
Wong and Law had been given community service orders, and Chow a suspended jail sentence, for unlawful assembly. But they were eventually put behind bars after the Department of Justice took the trio back to an appeal court demanding stronger punishment.
The 12 senior foreign lawyers who signed the letter included Charles Falconer – a former British lord chancellor – and five other queen’s counsels. American lawyer Jared Genser, who represented the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi when she was under house arrest, was also among the signatories.
They said they regarded the imprisonment of the trio as “a serious threat to the rule of law and a breach of the principle of ‘double jeopardy’ in Hong Kong – in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)”.
Under the double jeopardy principle, a person who has been acquitted or convicted will be spared any further prosecution for the same offence, since certainty and closure has been granted to the accused.
