A high-profile British judge who resigned from Hong Kong’s highest court last week has warned the city is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and judges are being compromised by an “impossible political environment created by China”.
Lord Sumption’s comments on Monday came as a third senior foreign judge in the past week resigned from the Court of Final Appeal.
“The problem in Hong Kong has been building up over the last four years and I think all the judges on the court feel concerned about this,” Lord Sumption told the BBC’s Today programme.
“I have reached the point eventually where I don’t think that my continuing presence on the court is serving any useful purpose.”
On Monday he wrote in a newspaper op-ed that the city’s rule of law has been “profoundly compromised”.
Macau never had the same autonomy as HK. They saw themselves as a part of China colonized by Portugal, whereas Hong Kong was proudly independent and part of the British Empire.
So the situation there is just the same as it is in HK right now, it just didn’t bother the people a whole lot. Their entire business model as a country was catering to the Chinese society anyway, and on that end, nothing changed.