Hong Kong dissidents back courtroom for marathon bail hearing
02 March, 2021
Dozens of Hong Kong activists charged with subversion are actually back in courtroom on Tuesday (Mar 2) to complete a good marathon bail hearing that was first adjourned overnight when 4 defendants were rushed to hospital after hours of legal wrangling.
Law enforcement arrested 47 of the city's most widely known dissidents on Sunday for "conspiracy to commit subversion" in the broadest work with yet of a good sweeping national security laws that Beijing imposed on metropolis last year.
The defendants represent a wide cross-section of Hong Kong's opposition, from veteran former pro-democracy lawmakers to academics, lawyers, social employees and youth activists.
A huge selection of supporters gathered outside a courthouse on Mon for the primary post-fee bail hearing, chanting democracy slogans - a rare resurgence of defiance found in a metropolis where protest has been all but outlawed during the last year.
Normally such a bail hearing might take little more when compared to a couple of hours.
However the court struggled to cope with the sheer caseload in addition to the legal vagaries of the broadly-worded security regulation, which gets rid of the presumption of bail for non-violent crimes.
The court sat on and off for about 15 hours throughout Mon as the prosecution needed the activists to be held in custody before next hearing in three weeks' time as the defence tried to pursue bail.
An adjournment just came in the tiny hours of Tuesday morning hours after among the defendants, Clarisse Yeung, collapsed and was rushed to medical center. Three other defendants were subsequently taken up to hospital in ambulances.
At the time of the adjournment, not even half of the bail hearings for the 47 defendants had been heard, an AFP reporter in court said.
HIGH BAR FOR BAIL
Beijing is struggling to quash dissent in semi-autonomous Hong Kong after big and sometimes violent pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019.
The security law has been the spear tip of this crackdown, criminalising any act regarded as subversion, secession, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces.
It has radically transformed semi-autonomous Hong Kong's romantic relationship with the authoritarian mainland and outlawed substantially dissent found in the once free-wheeling finance hub.
One key area of transformation is bail.
Under the new regulation, defendants might only be granted bail if indeed they can persuade a court they no more pose any kind of national security risk.
Before Monday's hearing, those charged with a national security crime have been held on remand, despite agreeing to restrictive measures like house arrest and making not any public statements.
The alleged offence for the 47 facing subversion charges was organising an unofficial primary election last summer months to choose applicants for the city's legislature, in the expectations that the pro-democracy bloc might take many and block government legislation.
Chinese and Hong Kong officials said this was an effort to "overthrow" the city's government, and therefore a threat to countrywide security.
Critics, including many western powers, have accused China of effectively outlawing opposition politics and shredding the freedoms and autonomy it promised Hong Kong could maintain prior to the territory's handover from the British.
"This trial possesses nothing to do with law, it merely displays the way the Chinese Communist party nakedly abuses its powers and uses the courts to show that power," Nathan Law, a Hong Kong democracy activist who fled to Britain, stated on Facebook Tuesday.
Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Look at, said the subversion expenses were appearing brought against people "who sought peaceful transformation through the democratic method".
China features dismissed criticism of its Hong Kong crackdown, telling it must restore stability after 2019's protests and ensure only "staunch patriots" are allowed to run Hong Kong.
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