Police stand guard outside the High Court in Hong Kong on Dec. 1.
Photo:
jerome favre/Shutterstock
Newspaper publisher
Jimmy Lai’s
trial on national security charges has been delayed until September. Already he has been convicted on trumped-up charges of business fraud and participating in unlawful protests. But even from his prison cell, Mr. Lai is embarrassing Hong Kong authorities, who have to keep changing the rules to get him.
On Monday White House national security adviser
Jake Sullivan
put it bluntly. “What’s just happened with respect to Jimmy Lai is a—in our view, a violation of the basic law and the commitments that China made with respect to autonomy for Hong Kong.” Two days earlier, after Mr. Lai was handed a 69-month sentence on his fraud conviction, State Department spokesman
Ned Price
tweeted that the U.S. condemns the “grossly unjust outcome.”
Now comes the delay in his national security trial—the result of the Hong Kong government’s determination to fight Mr. Lai’s hiring of a British lawyer, King’s Counsel
Timothy Owen,
to represent him. Although it’s been standard practice for lawyers from common-law jurisdictions to practice in Hong Kong, the government now wants to prevent this in national security cases. Apparently it’s not enough that Mr. Lai’s trial will feature three national security judges instead of a jury.
But the Hong Kong government lost its bid to keep Mr. Owen out of court, then lost again on appeal, then lost again at the Court of Final Appeal. Rather than accept the decision of its own courts, Hong Kong then asked the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing to overrule Hong Kong courts. Chief Executive
John Lee
also had the Immigration Department refuse to extend Mr. Owen’s work visa, to keep him from representing Mr. Lai.
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