Article was originally published in South China Morning Post on 31 March 2015
Recent harsh criticism of local judges by pro-Beijing figures has called into question Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung’s willingness to stand up for the judiciary, a group of pro-democracy lawyers said.
The Progressive Lawyers Group on Monday questioned Yuen’s failure to defend the judiciary against what the group saw as “unwarranted attacks on the judiciary”.
“We … call on the secretary for justice, who under common law tradition and convention is tasked with being the ultimate defender of the judiciary, to speak out clearly and forcefully against such outrageous and scurrilous attacks on the judiciary,” the group said in a statement.
Critics say judges should not have cleared protesters or treated them leniently by binding them over for offences ranging from participating in an unauthorised assembly to obstructing police.
The Justice Department later issued a press release setting out its stand. It noted comments by Yuen at last year’s opening of the legal year, in which he criticised “abusive attacks and unwarranted conduct which would undermine the independence of the judiciary”.
The justice secretary also called on the community “not to take any step which may constitute contempt of court or other criminal offences, or otherwise may prejudice judicial independence”. He said the Justice Department would not hesitate to take appropriate action.
Among the highest-profile figures criticising judges was Elizabeth Quat, a lawmaker from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, the city’s biggest pro-Beijing political party.
She said there was a trend where “the police arrest [and] the courts release” protesters in the wake of the Occupy protests. She made the comment in a question she raised with Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying in a Legislative Council session last week.
But more extreme comments were made by pro-Beijing group Clean Hong Kong. During its protests, it used slogans such as “Judges who ruin Hong Kong, hurry up and go home”, “Fake wig judges do not follow laws”, and “Judges ruling recklessly have killed the rule of law”.
It called judges “yellow corpses”, a homonym in Cantonese for yellow ribbons, the symbol of the Occupy protesters.
During last year’s Occupy protests, the pro-Beijing camp repeatedly called on protesters to comply with the rule of law.
Also last week, Patrick Ko Tat-bun, convenor of the pro-Beijing group Voice of Loving Hong Kong, lamented that “dog-judges” in the courts had passed lenient judgments against protesters whom the police “arrested with hard work”.
