Thread by @ayhcheung

UPDATED AND CORRECTED thread on the two recent #HK injunctions 1/

This thread will make more sense if you've read the official Court documents themselves. The ones that matter for right now are the penal notices (referred to as the "injunction orders"). Direct links:

"Doxxing": police.gov.hk/ppp_en/03_poli…

TG/LIHKG: police.gov.hk/ppp_en/03_poli…

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Two things to note about penal notices:

1) Their terms have to be clear. Disobeying an injunction is a contempt of court, which can mean jail. So obviously you need to know (a) who's affected and (b) what the injunction prohibits.

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2) They have to be served, i.e. copies *must* be given to the (putative) defendants. Again, this is to ensure that everybody knows where they stand and don't get caught by surprise.

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Sometimes the Court can order substituted service, i.e. methods other than delivery of physical copies of the Court documents. But the point is that the plaintiff *has* to make a meaningful effort to alert the defendants to the penal notice and its contents.

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Also note that both injunctions were obtained ex parte, i.e. with only the plaintiffs' lawyers present.

This means two more things:

1) The applicant *must* dot all their i's and cross all their t's, since there's no defence team to get the record straight.

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2) An inter partes hearing, where *both* parties are present, must be held ASAP to consider whether to continue the orders.

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Now we can turn to what the penal orders say.

Who do the orders affect? (It can't be "the entire HK population".)

Both orders say the defendants are people who are doing the acts referred to in the Indorsement of Claim.

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The relevant passages of the Indorsements of Claim are *not* reproduced in the penal notices themselves.

So you have to look at the Indorsements to find out if you're a defendant.

And what are those?

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Indorsements of Claim are brief descriptions of what the cause of action is, annexed to a Writ of Summons.

How any lay person is supposed to figure that out from the document descriptions, I have no idea.

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Note that the linked pages do *not* refer to Indorsements of Claim.

They refer to Writs of Summons, without *any* explanation of what they are and why you have to read them *to figure out if you are subject to the injunction*.

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I'd go into the substance of the injunctions, but enough other people have talked about that.

So I'll confine myself to pointing out that the syntax of the TG/LIHKG order is, erm, badly mangled.

Almost as if it had been hastily translated from Chinese.

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Given that the judge who allowed that injunction was *Russell Coleman*, a former Bar Chair and commercial barrister, I surmise that he simply adopted the wording that @newsgovhk put in front of him.

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Then there's the issue of service.

The penal notices say that substituted service of the Writ, the penal notice, *and* the inter partes summons (with info on when the inter partes hearing will be) can be done by posting them on the @newsgovhk *and* @hkpoliceforce sites.

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First, the TG/LIHKG site does *not* refer to the inter partes summons.

Compare and contrast:

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Second, good luck even *finding* the @hkpoliceforce pages I linked to.

This is what their home page looks like right now:

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@hkpoliceforce And this is what you see when you go to "Police Messages" and click on "Press Release":

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@hkpoliceforce Scroll down past several days of press releases, and you find one referring to the TG/LIHKG injunction. Click on the headline to expand it, and you get this:

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Scroll down a little more, and you get this.

Notice anything? Or rather, notice anything *missing*?

That's right - you can't even get the court documents relating to the TG/LIHKG injunction through this poorly-designed website.

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You'd think things would be better for the doxxing injunction, given that the police have had (at this point) a couple of weeks to get it right.

Nope.

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Turns out that - if you scroll down a bit more on the HKPF homepage - you see three small buttons on the right sidebar, hidden amidst a bunch of other things:

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So, yes, *technically* the court documents are on the HKPF website. But the police sure don't seem awfully keen on you finding them.

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What about the website of the HK Gov't? Recall that the penal notices said that substituted service required that *all* of the documents referred to be posted on *both* websites.

So let's have a look, shall we?

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Here's what gov.hk looks like. Here's the top...

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OK, let's get rid of the obnoxious cycling ads on the top.

Oh, wait, there's *another* set of cycling messages here:

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Still nothing...

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No, that's not it either...

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Oh wait, *here* they are, cunningly concealed as the *last three items* in the ad cycle:

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I just re-loaded the GovHK site in a private window (so no cookies and no cache), so I could see how long the cycling ads took to get to the injunction references.

It took *more than 20 seconds* for the *first* reference to an injunction to show up.

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So - yes, *technically* @newsgovhk has posted the court documents online, and so has @hkpoliceforce, and I was rather mistaken in my earlier thread.

But it certainly seems like they're making it awfully hard to find the documents.

Which is NOT the point of service.

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@newsgovhk @hkpoliceforce OK, so let's assume that you *somehow* managed to wait 20+ seconds at GovHK, or found the police notices hidden below the (presumably much more important) "JPC & SPC Online Portal" button.

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@newsgovhk @hkpoliceforce Let's further assume that you start off not knowing what an "Indorsement of Claim" is, but figure it out after going through all the PDFs.

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@newsgovhk @hkpoliceforce Let's assume that you somehow figure out that you *might* be a defendant (after cross-referencing the penal notice and the writ - something that the HKPF and GovHK websites *don't* say you have to do).

Let's assume you want to challenge the orders.

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@newsgovhk @hkpoliceforce Well, you're going to have to wait. Both of the inter partes hearings were due to be held *more than two weeks* after the ex parte orders were handed down.

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@newsgovhk @hkpoliceforce So, in summary:

- The penal notices, on their own, *don't* tell you who they affect

- @newsgovhk and @hkpoliceforce don't tell you what documents *do* give that information

- And both of them have done what might charitably be called the *bare minimum* to put them online

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@newsgovhk @hkpoliceforce You know what this is? This is "Beware of the Leopard":

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitch…

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