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”.
“One country, two systems” isn’t quite as “two systems” as was promised, much to the surprise of pretty much nobody. I wonder what the situation is in Macau?
I guess it wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere that the two systems were supposed to be different from each other. /s
“One country, two systems that are totally not the same system we swear”