One Year After Occupy Central, Hong Kong Officials Have Yet to Investigate Beating

One year after a week-long student strike kicked off the 79-day Occupy Central pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, activists have slammed a lack of progress over allegations of police brutality, including the beating of a prominent democracy activist filmed by journalists as it happened.

Video footage filmed live at protests last November by local journalists showed Civic Party member Ken Tsang being beaten and kicked by a group of police officers in a dark area while they were clearing a main road of protesters in a violent crackdown.

Tsang later showed journalists his injuries and vowed to sue the seven officers—two inspectors and five constables—who were later arrested on suspicion of "assault resulting in grievous body harm," but have yet to be charged, prompting Tsang's lawyers to apply for a judicial review.

"The relationships between the police and citizens, between the government, the judiciary and the people of Hong Kong, and public confidence in the rule of law, are at an all-time low," Tsang told RFA in an interview on Thursday.

"If police officers abuse their power and cause physical harm to someone, or if they commit a crime, we ... want a properly functioning system of oversight," he said.

"Anyone who commits a crime should be tried in a court of law."

The head of the former British colony's police watchdog Larry Kwok told local media on Thursday that the decision whether or not to prosecute the seven officers was "a serious matter that cannot be decided by merely watching two video clips."

Kwok said the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has yet to start investigating Tsang's complaint.

Of the 172 complaints requiring the attention of the IPCC, 82 percent have either been rejected or classified as “unable to investigate," he said.

But he rejected suggestions that the agency had been slow to act on complaints linked to the Occupy protests.

Civil Human Rights Front deputy leader Eddie Chan said Kwok had behaved unprofessionally by making the comments, which he said were biased in favor of the police.

"It's hard for people to believe in the IPCC as a fair and just organization," Chan said. "On top of that, it doesn't have enough powers, so naturally the general public have their doubts about the IPCC."

A Man, an activist with the pro-establishment Loyalty Militia, agreed that the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement is harming public trust in the rule of law in Hong Kong, which was promised the continuation of existing rights and freedoms under the terms of its 1997 handover to China.

But he said police should have arrested more people on public order charges in the wake of the protests.

"Before Occupy Central, the rule of law meant that if you committed a crime, you would be legally arrested and given a reasonable prison sentence," A Man said.

"But in the case of the three founders of the Occupy movement, they turned themselves in to police and confessed to having broken the law, and yet they still haven't been charged," he said.

Anniversary of movement

Pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong are planning a number of activities from next Monday to mark the anniversary of the first mass sit-in of the Occupy civil disobedience movement, which sparked clashes between umbrella-wielding protesters and riot police with tear-gas, pepper spray and batons on Sept. 28.

Public anger soared in the wake of the clashes, and the movement brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the city's streets at its heights, many of them calling for fully democratic elections.

Protesters with yellow umbrellas will observe a 15-minute silence from 5:58 pm on Sept. 28, the time when police fired the first canister of tear gas against protesters a year earlier, local media reported.

Meanwhile, student groups are planning public seminars outside the Legislative Council and outside government offices in Tamar Park from Sept. 26-30 to discuss Hong Kong’s political future.

Hong Kong was promised a "high degree of autonomy" under the terms of its 1997 return to Chinese rule, within the "one country, two systems" framework agreed between British and Chinese officials and enshrined in its mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

In June 2014, an unofficial referendum saw 400,000 people vote in favor of universal suffrage and public nominations, in spite of a central government white paper spelling out that the city's autonomy was still subject to the will of Beijing, and didn't constitute full autonomy, nor decentralized power.

The Occupy movement was sparked by an Aug. 31, 2014 electoral reform plan outlined by China's parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC), to allow all of Hong Kong's five million eligible voters to cast a ballot in the 2017 race for the next chief executive, but would have limited the slate to candidates approved by Beijing.

It was rejected by pan-democratic lawmakers and Occupy Central protesters as "fake universal suffrage."

Hong Kong lawmakers dealt a death blow to Beijing's electoral reform package on June 18, in a humiliating defeat for Hong Kong's chief executive Leung Chun-ying and for Chinese officials.

Reported by Wen Yuqing for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.