Washington-based human rights NGO Freedom House has given Hong Kong a low freedom rating citing “Beijing’s encroachment on freedoms”.
The individual country rankings, which were released yesterday, reveal Hong Kong’s aggregate score for 2018 is 59, down from 61 in 2017, and 63 in 2016.
Hong Kong ranked 111th overall, and another country with the same score of 59 as Hong Kong is Fiji. Both are just one point behind Burkina Faso and Ecuador.
For its overall freedom rating, Hong Kong scored 3.5 out of five to give it a rating of “partly-free”.
In its key findings, Freedom House also gave the city a so-called “downward trend arrow” saying the “Communist Party leadership in Beijing exercised ever-greater influence in Hong Kong as it attempted to stamp out growing public support for local self-determination”.
Among examples of concerning cases, the group cited the expulsion of four pro-democracy lawmakers from the Legislative Council last year, who joined two other lawmakers expelled in 2016, after it was deemed they incorrectly swore their oaths of office.
They also noted the jailing of student leaders for their involvement in the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and efforts by pro-Beijing authorities to stamp out movements calling for self-determination.
In August, student leaders Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow were jailed after the government appealed for a harsher punishment for the trio for their roles in a 2014 protest which sparked the 79-day Occupy Movement.
Law and Wong were released on bail in October. Yesterday, the trio were in court to appeal against their jail terms.
Law was also one of four lawmakers — together with Lau Siu-lai, Leung Kwok-hung and Edward Yiu — who were stripped of their seats in July during the oath-taking row where the quartet were accused of not taking their oaths of office in a “sincere and solemn” manner in October 2016.
The claimed faults included one lawmaker reading the oath under a yellow umbrella, the symbol for the Umbrella Movement, and another reading the oath in “slow motion” by pausing for six seconds between every word.
Yiu is expected to stand for election again after he won the primaries held by pro-democracy parties for a seat representing West Kowloon.
The NGO also specifically cited the controversial national anthem law, which was inserted into the city’s laws late last year following years of Hong Kong football fans booing the Chinese national anthem at matches.
The law, which is yet to be adapted by Hong Kong locally, stipulates harsh penalties for “disrespecting” the Chinese national anthem.
With so much political doom and gloom, the only appropriate thing to do really is end with a song.
So here is Stephen Chow from the 1991 film Fight Back to School where he plays a police officer going who discovers stolen arms while working under cover at a school.
The song you ask? A Cantopop classic by singer Jackson Wan Kwong which literally translates to “iron windows red tears”.
