February 6, 2025
The Hong Kong people are suffering in a super-sized way from the current frustration of many democracies—growing mistrust and disbelief in their own governments.
The Legal Crisis Behind the Hong Kong Protests
The Legal Crisis Behind the Hong Kong Protests

On February 8, 2018, a nineteen-year-old Hong Kong Chinese man, Chan Tong-kai, took his girlfriend, Poon Hui-wing (who was twenty years old) to Taipei for a Valentine’s holiday. Whilst there, in their hotel room, Hui-wing told Tong-kai that her pregnancy was courtesy of another man. Then, in a characteristic contemporary use of her electronic device, she showed him a video of herself having sex with another man. It is not clear from reports whether this man was the father of the child or someone else. This sort of impromptu provocation would have been much more difficult to organise twenty years ago.

Tong-kai’s reaction was to smash Hui-wing’s head against a wall, grab her from behind and strangle her. After shoving her to the ground he succeeded after ten minutes in causing her to expire. He then placed her body in a bag, took the local MTR five stops out of town and threw the bag onto some waste ground near the station. He stole her HSBC credit card, a Casio digital camera, her iPhone 6 and $20,000 each of Hong Kong and Taiwan currency. He then returned to Hong Kong, where he used the credit card at Eastern Court shopping centre.

On March 13, 2018, Hui-wing’s body was discovered. On the same day the Hong Kong police visited her flat in Hong Kong and found Tong-kai’s entrance and departure permit for Taipei. He was arrested that day and has been in custody ever since. The Taiwanese authorities, and Hui-wing’s family, asked the Chief Executive of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region (SAR), Carrie Lam, to extradite Tong-kai to Taiwan to be tried for murder.

Hong Kong has extradition treaties with forty-three countries but not with Taiwan. When it comes to China and Taiwan (and indeed Macau, the licensed joker of mainland Chinese communism) the Hong Kong government has found itself on the horns of a dragon, for, being a common-law system regime with an independent judiciary and a guaranteed right to uphold that system under its Basic Law, it has not been able to recognise Chinese mainland courts as independent and reliable dispensers of fair and equal justice to those appearing before them. On the other hand, now being a special administrative region within China, Hong Kong’s official policy is not to recognise Taiwan as an independent nation-state with whom one can have extradition treaties.

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See Also:

(1) Hong Kong’s Carrie Lam offers a ‘platform for dialogue’ delay tactic, but there are no solutions in sight

(2) Violence erupts across Hong Kong as police fire ‘warning shots,’ MTR closes 5 lines and officers storm train carriage

(3) Hong Kong police are spraying protesters with blue-dye water cannons to mark them for arrest later

(4) PLA troops or not, what really matters is Hong Kong’s post-protests relationship with mainland China

(5) ‘How to kill Hong Kong police’ and what comes next