Millions of people in Hong Kong have come out to stop a proposed law that would have allowed China to try accused criminals, including political dissidents, in Chinese courts. Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha

On June 15, in response to massive popular resistance, Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced she would suspend a vote on a proposed new law that would allow China to extradite suspects accused of certain crimes and prosecute them in Chinese courts.

For over a week, some 1.3 million people had gathered daily outside Hong Kong’s legislature to protest the legislation, which protesters say China will abuse to extradite political dissidents. They managed to postpone a June 12 vote by blocking entry to the legislative building. Days later, consideration of the law was indefinitely postponed.

That temporarily protects Hong Kong’s judicial system, one of the island territory’s few remaining areas of government autonomy from China.

Protesters are now demanding that the bill be withdrawn, not just suspended. If the law comes up for vote at a later date, it will likely pass in Hong Kong’s legislative council, where pro-China forces dominate.

‘One country, two systems’

Chinese rule over Hong Kong, an island territory off the coast of Shenzhen, has long been disputed.

The British colonized Hong Kong in the 1800s following the Opium Wars. But China never accepted this territorial claim, and insisted throughout the 20th century that Hong Kong belonged to China.

In 1997, after a decade of negotiations between the United Kingdom and China, Hong Kong returned to China – with some strings attached. Knowing that Hong Kong had developed under a Western system of government, then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made Hong Kong a “Special Autonomous Region” and agreed to give the island a 50-year transition period to come fully under Chinese rule.

Under this system, Hong Kong would retain its judicial system and legislative council, affording the island relative independence in its day-to-day operations. But Hong Kong would belong to China. The arrangement became known as “one country, two systems.”

Controversially, full suffrage and free elections were not part of the 1997 deal.

For two decades, though, the “one country, two systems” arrangement seemed to give Hong Kong relative autonomy from Chinese interference.

Then, in 2014, China announced that people would be allowed to vote in Hong Kong’s 2017 chief executive election only from a short list of preapproved candidates.

Thousands took to the streets to demand universal suffrage. To protect themselves from police spraying tear gas at the front lines, they used umbrellas, giving rise to the name the “Umbrella Movement.”

Umbrella Movement protesters face off against police, Sept. 28, 2014. Reuters/Bobby Yip

In the years since the uprising, I have interviewed numerous democracy activists in Hong Kong as part of my academic research into the evolution of social movements.

Many participants told me that they believed the 2014 Umbrella Movement had ended peacefully because China didn’t want another Tiananmen Square on its hands. In 1989, Chinese soldiers opened fire on student protesters in Beijing, killing hundreds and raising global uproar.

Emboldened by international support for the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s young activists have continued their efforts to protect their independence from China. Nine Umbrella Movement leaders ran for local office in Hong Kong in the territory’s 2015 elections.

In 2016 elections, two pro-independence politicians even won seats in the legislative council. However, they were quickly expelled for “failing” to properly recite their loyalty oaths at a swearing-in ceremony.

In 2017 Carrie Lam, a candidate loyal to Beijing and the driving force behind the extradition law, was elected Chief Executive – Hong Kong’s highest public official.

Creeping Chinese influence

Under Lam’s leadership, traditionally pro-democracy politicians were removed from office. Some were even arrested and jailed as dissidents.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. Wikimedia Commons

Today, only 24 pro-democracy politicians remain in Hong Kong’s 70-seat legislative council.

Increasing Chinese influence on the island territory also threatens Hong Kong’s clout as a major economic hub.

For decades, Hong Kong’s relative autonomy has made the island territory an appealing place to do business in Asia. But under stronger Chinese rule, financial markets and regulatory systems in Hong Kong may become less reliable as they begin to reflect the national interests of China – not those of the free market.

The American Chamber of Commerce and several prominent Hong Kong business leaders have publicly spoken out against the extradition law.

“Spiriting people away over the border would undermine business confidence,” one hedge fund manager told the nonprofit human rights organization Hong Kong Watch.

Human rights at stake

Hong Kong’s legal system is now the only surviving pillar of “one country, two systems,” which was created to give Hong Kong autonomy over its legal, economic and financial affairs.

If the postponed extradition law passes, there will be no meaningful remaining barriers between democratic-leaning Hong Kong and authoritarian China.

For many in Hong Kong, that’s an intolerable future.

An assessment by the World Justice Project, a nonprofit organization that works to advance the rule of law worldwide, ranks Hong Kong 16th and China 82nd worldwide based on their constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice and criminal justice.

China is a known violator of human rights. It systematically surveils and represses ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs, a Muslim population in China’s northwest region, and restricts internet access. The government has jailed hundreds of human rights lawyers since 2015.

Political dissidence is not tolerated in China. The late Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in Chinese prison for “inciting subversion of state power.” He died in prison in 2017 after being denied travel abroad for cancer treatment.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, has a rich history of mass demonstrations.

Hong Kong protesters carry umbrellas – a symbolic reminder of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, June 17, 2019. Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha

In Hong Kong’s 1966 Star Ferry riots, people protested the British colonial government’s decision to increase transit fares. And every July 1 since 2003 – the anniversary of the 1997 transition from British to Chinese rule – people have taken to the streets pleading for universal suffrage.

“One country, two systems” has allowed Hong Kong residents to openly disagree with policymakers in a way mainland Chinese cannot. As required by Hong Kong’s legal system, democracy protesters arrested for their political activism are given legal representation, trials and serve time in Hong Kong’s well-regulated prisons.

The extradition law’s threat of trial and punishment in China would have a chilling effect on future democracy demonstrations there.

If “One country, two systems” falls, what remains of Hong Kong’s democracy will go down with it.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax is refusing to resign after denying charges by two women who have said that he sexually assaulted them.

shutterstock

The first woman to come forward was Vanessa Tyson, a politics professor at Scripps College. She initially contacted The Washington Post after Fairfax’s election in December 2017, alleging that Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex in 2004.

The Post stated it did not publish a story at that time because it “could not corroborate Tyson’s account or find similar complaints of sexual misconduct.”

So Tyson’s story did not make national headlines until this week, when it was first published by the conservative blog Big League Politics.
The second woman to come forward is Meredith Watson, who alleges Fairfax raped her while they were both students at Duke University in 2000. According to a statement written by her attorneys, Watson told a dean at the school about the rape, and the dean “discouraged her from pursuing the claim further.”

On Feb. 9, Fairfax asked the FBI to investigate their allegations. While it’s not clear that the FBI will investigate, the controversy raises important questions about how the legal system deals with cases of sexual assault.

I am a scholar of domestic and sexual violence, and my work has focused on analyzing the stories survivors share when they seek safety and hold perpetrators accountable for abuse. I’ve also studied what happens when the legal system encounters and processes these stories.

What I’ve found is a fundamental mismatch between what survivors disclose and what legal systems need to hear to take action.

Survivors and systems unaligned

Survivors of sexual assault expect to be able to share what they have experienced in a way that reflects how they have made sense of the event and its aftermath.

In contrast, courts want a report that is linear, providing an almost objective, dispassionate accounting of abuse with specific names, dates and “facts.” They want independent evidence of the abuse.

Activists demonstrate as the Senate Judiciary Committee hears from both Ford and Kavanaugh. AP//J. Scott Applewhite

The problem is, acts of sexual and domestic violence rarely occur in front of other people, and survivors of sexual and domestic violence often have little external evidence of their assault other than their story.

The end result is that systems that are supposed to help are, in general, unable to adequately assess and respond to survivors’ stories.
For example, officers responding to cases of domestic violence often do not make arrests, especially in cases of sexual violence.

In an analysis of FBI data, my colleague Matthew Fetzer and I found that only 26 percent of cases of sexual domestic violence reported to the police resulted in an arrest (in comparison to 52 percent of cases of physical domestic violence).

This may be due to the intimate nature of sexual violence and the difficulty of proving sexual assault. As one woman who experienced sexual violence told researchers: “I was raped by my husband. There was no evidence except for bruises on the inside of my legs or the pain on my breasts, and you just can’t prove it.”

Many institutions and organizations make decisions based on stereotypes about survivors that rarely reflect their actual circumstances.

That’s especially true with survivors who are not “good victims,” who are not white, middle-class women, and who do not have external documentation of their abuse.

For many survivors – especially women of color, women reporting violence committed by perpetrators who hold power or women who experience sexual violence – it’s easier and safer to not report the abuse and pretend that the resulting trauma never happened.

To an outsider, the choice not to report an assault in the moment, or even years later, does not make sense.

They do not understand how survivors compartmentalize in order to survive or even thrive.

Many legal options for reporting sexual assault – such as calling the police – aren’t designed with survivors’ goals, needs and motivations in mind. So survivors do not see reporting as an option, and do not see the legal system as a resource.

Many survivors of assault are afraid to make reports to the police. Jacek Wojnarowski/Shutterstock

Expecting a survivor to disclose their abuse to someone in the moment does not reflect current knowledge and theory about sexual and domestic assault.

Rethinking responses to violence

The Fairfax story is an opportunity to rethink how to help survivors of violence and how to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions.
In the right environment and with the right support, survivors will want to come forward, share their stories, and gain strength from doing so.

However, the legal system is an adversarial system with confusing and complex bureaucratic procedures and often untrained staff. As trauma scholar Dr. Judith Herman explains, “If one set out intentionally to design a system for provoking symptoms of traumatic stress, it might look very much like a court of law.”

Survivors are asked to recall specific details about their victimization that they have repressed in order to survive. As one advocate said to me in an interview, “They’re trying to forget what happened and here I am, asking them to write down, with as many details as they can, what they went through.”

How might we create a more responsive system?

First: Stop requiring survivors to narrate their abuse. It’s more detrimental than helpful, especially if we simply discount it as a “story” afterward.

If there is some form of external documentation, survivors should be able to provide that instead. If there is no external documentation, then the narrative should be elicited in a supportive environment of the survivor’s choosing, with trained staff available to help them better understand the kinds of information that judges and law enforcement need.

Second: People charged with listening and responding to survivors need to be educated about the dynamics of domestic and sexual violence. While some are, many do not fully understand the ways in which domestic and sexual violence affect survivors. It is impossible for them to hear and respond appropriately unless they understand those dynamics.

Finally: Explore what believing and supporting a survivor means.

While the words “I believe” and “I support” are critically important, they should not become buzzwords that replace actions. When you believe a survivor and decide to support that survivor, you must act. You must make hard, even unpopular, decisions.

You must work to adapt the system in order to uphold justice.

I believe. Period. I believe.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story originally published on Oct. 12, 2018.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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