Extradition bill critics find friend in fugitive tycoon Joseph Lau
- The billionaire, who faces jail in Macau, has every reason to be worried and has applied for a judicial review to challenge the Hong Kong government’s controversial plan
Joseph Lau Luen-hung can hire the best legal brains money can buy. His own son, Lau Ming-wai, holds a doctorate in law and is an occasional lecturer at Harvard Law School.
So the fugitive tycoon has everyone scratching their heads when it emerges that he has applied for a judicial review to challenge the government’s controversial plan to allow the extradition of suspects from Hong Kong to the mainland, Taiwan and Macau.
Lau is, of course, worried. The former chairman of China Estates Holdings was sentenced to more than five years in jail by a Macau court in 2014 in a corruption scandal that involved paying a HK$20 million bribe to Macau’s notorious ex-public works chief Ao Man-long, who was jailed for 29 years in 2012. But has Lau jumped the gun? His application flies in the face of basic legal principles. There isn’t even an extradition law in place that Lau and his legal team can challenge at the moment.
The passage of the bill is far from assured. Even if it passes, it’s not clear that the bill, already amended to drop nine commercial crimes from the proposed list of 46 extraditable offences, will not be changed again.
In his judicial application, Lau’s lawyers argue that such an extradition, if enacted against him, would be retroactive and would contravene a fundamental principle of common law. But a law is only unfair when applied retroactively to acts that were not illegal before its enactment. Lau is simply a fugitive from justice in Macau.
Many legal experts think it’s more than likely the court will toss out his application. What then is Lau’s game? Most likely, it’s political rather than legal. It’s probably not a coincidence that he filed at the High Court days after a large rally was staged by the opposition and human rights groups against the extradition bill.
In the past, some opposition lawmakers filed seemingly futile judicial reviews, such as the one applied for by “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung against joint border checkpoints with mainland officers at the West Kowloon high-speed rail terminal.
In that way, Lau wants to be seen to be fighting not only for himself but for the opposition, or even the people of Hong Kong, against the government. As for the opposition, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.