Thread by @XinqiSu

#Thread about Chow Hang-tung @zouxingtong and Gwyneth Ho @KwaiLamHo , the vertiginous Wednesday and the less-discussed legal fights they have been devoting to.

It was more or less expected but still fictional than fiction that five hours before Ho was due to appear in court...

...national security police arrived at her counsel Chow's chamber and impatiently rang the doorbell.

Chow who worked overnight in the chamber for Ho's application did not immediately answer - like how she handled the police's letter demanding HK Alliance to empty its bag.

Instead, Chow started two - not so successful as she concluded in police custody - FB live, telling the world that police was at her door, and made a series of public posts, beading the last free moments she had, such as...

...a photo of sun rise from the meeting room, joking about her bad breath as she hadn't brushed her teeth, and asking people to leave her a farewell message.

"They are here. Pity that I can't stand for Ah Lam (Gwyneth)," one of those posts read.

While reporters were stranded on the ground by the building's security guards, who after rounds of paltering eventually admitted that "police are operating", Chow, on her own, dragged on for nearly two hours before being taken away in a seven seater.

Some two hours later, Gwyneth appeared in court no 7 of High Court, represented by substitute counsel Douglas Kwok. Her application to remove the reporting restriction on bail application proceeding was bluntly rejected by #NSL judge Esther Toh within 8 minutes.

Gwyneth, a journalist-turned activist who has determined that her best interest, instead of seeking commutation, lies in defending free speech, withdrew her application for bail as reporting restrictions remained.

In three FB posts published before and after the hearing, Gwyneth explained why she must challenge the reporting restriction first and would rather sacrifice her bail application shall it not be removed.

"A procedure that's not open nor fair is meaningless."

"It's exactly my finding that my interest as a defendant in this case can only be protected when my bail hearing is fully open to the public."

"What's really undermining my interest is not the reporting, but the judicial procedures that turn a blind eye to injustice."

She published part of Chow's submission:

"It is artificial to the extreme to say that the Court cannot be satisfied of the negative test that a defendant will not commit acts endangering national security when the content of such acts has never been clearly identified."

It was merely 11am when Gwyneth was led out of court, with loss of her counsel to the same law she is charged under, and of a chance to get conditional free time from a judge appointed under that law.

Meanwhile, a dozen of others in the same case as Gwyneth but have got bail...

...were asked to go to the police HQs and pick up the "evidence" against them - four big stacks of papers for each person. Tmr is the deadline set by #NSL magistrate for the prosecution to provide the documents and the defendants, their lawyers have from now ...

...two weeks to read the 16 packs of documents before they return to West Kowloon Magistrates Courts on 23 Sep for a second return day.

35 others in the case, so far, have been remanded for seven months, long enough for one of them Sam Cheung to officially become a dad...

...under forced absence from his wife's labour and son's birth.

It will take a yet-to-know number of months for them to get a trial day in Court of First Instance and to reach the final ruling of their case, which also means that many of them will be jailed for a long time...

...before trial and verdict.

Meanwhile the authorities' crackdown on civil society has been taking place at a shocking speed. Public space for criticism, campaign and advocacy withers. Activists are confined to jail or court rooms shall they still wish to argue.

That's the background of a number of articles by Chow and Gwyneth trying to analyse the changing political-legal landscape in Hong Kong, the impacts on Hong Kong society of those changes, and their point of view as a selected player in the #NSL legal battles.

On July 1, the day after Chow was rearrested, her article about 7 scenarios in which civil society and possibility of resistance were strangled when an authoritarian regime hijacked the idea of rule of law and weaponised legal procedures, was published.

During her remand in July, she wrote behind bars her reasons to apply for bail - challenging the outdated and arbitrary definition of "incitement", criticising the prosecution for criminalising free speech, and reemphazing that bail is a right under presumption of innocence.

After HK Alliance received the letter from police, Chow wrote another article arguing that cooperation with such a demand is a form of snitching that betrays ethics of social movement, facilitates spread of fear, and destructs trust among civil society members.

It's rather rare, esp in the post-#NSL era, for a barrister in Hong Kong to openly criticise the justice system and try to hold it accountable for the wipe-out of civil society. It's even more rare for Gwyneth, who was not trained in law, to serve in the set as an accused.

Gwyneth's (very hard) study of legal systems and judicial activism home and abroad was crystalized in a full-page article published on last Sunday's Ming Pao. In that article, Gwyneth argued that authoritarianism and rule of law are unnecessarily repelling each other.

Instead they can be happily married and give birth to a judicial system that can delicately serve the regime's interests while wearing the coat of "judicial independence" "rule of law" "procedural justice".

The real fight in a courtroom, Gwyneth argued, is not about winning or losing a case, nor getting longer or shorter sentence, but the definition and narrative of movements, norms and values of a society, or, in another word, "the Hong-Kong-ness of Hong Kong".

When political trials force the accused to deny theirselves, their beliefs, their advocacies and even tell on others in exchange of commutation, the regime is trying to eliminate a community by forcing the individuals to betray themselves, she found.

"If I out and out refuse to be eliminated, refuse to deny myself, refuse to be part of regime's building of terror, I am defending part of my community by defending myself," Gwyneth wrote.

"We won't help you spread fear," days ago Chow also said.

It's one of those intriguing twists in life that Gwyneth was quite a critic of HK Alliance as an org and its ideology, but she seems rather proud of having Chow as her counsel.
Now they have one problem in common, who is going to defend them in #NSL trials.
#endofthread