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On Sunday, the Hong Kong SAR regime is ready to nominate a parliament packed filled with communist celebration loyalists within the metropolis’s first common election since Beijing’s overhaul of the electoral system to make sure solely “patriots” maintain energy.
A mere three of the 153 candidates operating for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council are democrats, while the remaining majority are vetted, hand-picked authorities footmen, discrediting the notion that this ballot – which can little doubt be paraded by the Hong Kong regime as a token of democracy – retains any semblance of legitimacy.
The election will probably be additional tarnished by the overall absence – for the primary time in Hong Kong’s historical past – of opposition events, following the all-out warfare waged by Beijing in opposition to town’s traditionally spirited pro-democracy motion. For the final two years, lawmakers and activists have been, en masse, arbitrarily detained, imprisoned, gagged or compelled into exile.
From violently quashing Hong Kong’s well-liked pro-democracy motion in an unprecedented present of police brutality in 2019, to the compelled imposition of the nationwide safety regulation final yr, Beijing’s campaign in opposition to democracy, human rights and civil liberties within the territory has been relentless.
The nationwide safety regulation is a purposely imprecise laws, criminalising any act which could possibly be deemed by Hong Kong’s courts as amounting to secession, subversion, terrorism, or collusion with overseas forces. And maliciously constructed breaches of this laws are punishable by as much as life imprisonment.
Underneath the auspices of the regulation, greater than 150 individuals, together with pro-democracy politicians, activists, attorneys and journalists, have been arrested, with many languishing behind bars for months with out bail.
It has additionally develop into more and more clear that the Hong Kong regime, commandeering a judiciary weaponised as an instrument of repression, has sought to set harmful precedents for the upcoming trials of the 100 individuals charged underneath the nationwide safety regulation to date.
Over the summer season, the primary nationwide safety trial discovered the common slogan of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy motion, ‘Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Instances’, as amounting to inciting secession.
Orwellian speech-crime
Speech crime is now a darkish actuality in Beijing’s Orwellian makeover for Hong Kong, and as Amnesty Worldwide warned on the time, the ruling “primarily outlaws a preferred slogan broadly utilized by the pro-democracy motion and will allow future convictions of quite a few different protestors who used it.”
These circumstances supply solely a coup d’œil into the Beijing and Hong Kong SAR regimes’ systematic violations of democratic freedoms. Greater than 50 civil society organisations, skilled unions, and print media throughout Hong Kong – from the Tiananmen vigil group to impartial newspaper Apple Each day – have closed underneath the crushing weight of the nationwide safety regulation; their members detained, intimidated, and harassed.
And simply this week, jailed founding father of Apple Each day, Jimmy Lai, was sentenced to an additional 13 months in jail for collaborating in a vigil final yr commemorating the victims of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath.
The European Parliament has typically condemned in clear phrases Beijing’s mounting rights abuses in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, within the government department, inaction persists.
Regardless of inaugurating its Magnitsky-style sanctions regime final yr, designed to focus on these concerned in rights violations, the EU, as a complete, has but to noticeably problem China’s aggression in Hong Kong.
In July 2020, the European Council introduced a sequence of measures in response to the imposition of the nationwide safety regulation, together with the assessment of extradition agreements between Member States and Hong Kong, and the stepping up of educational exchanges and scholarships for Hongkongers to review within the EU. These measures, nonetheless, are largely but to be applied.
The EU has additionally imposed restricted sanctions on Chinese language officers responsible of gross human rights violations in opposition to the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, however has faltered and did not act decisively on Hong Kong.
The European Parliament, then again, has led the road on the European stage in standing as much as Beijing’s litany of repression in Hong Kong, most not too long ago by way of its adoption of a decision in September calling for a brand new EU-China technique based mostly on respect for democracy and human rights.
It’s excessive time that the Council and the Fee observe this lead, and that the EU, as a good champion of democracy, took resolute motion on Beijing’s systematic degradation of democracy and civil liberties in Hong Kong, suspends additional cooperation in commerce and customs, and sanctions officers responsible of persecuting freedom-loving Hongkongers.
Standing for Hong Kong means standing for our ideas and our long-term pursuits.
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