Hacker News Reader

Comment by hvidgaard | Hacker News Reader

From the very first paragraph of your link

> Under the principle, each of the two regions could continue to have its own governmental system, legal, economic and financial affairs, including trade relations with foreign countries.

Yet they're trying to pass a law that essentially allow China to extradite people in HK to mainland China, for any reason mainland China makes up. That is not 1 country, 2 systems as the legal system in mainland China can dictate what people they want extradited from HK. Even the EU have made a formal complaint against the law.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition-eu/e...

View on HN

This is not a factual description of the bill.

The extradition bill would allow mainland China (and Macau and Taiwan) to request HK authorities that some accused of having committed a crime there to be extradited. The request would then be examined by HK courts as is the case in extradition cases.

I understand that HK people don't trust mainland courts and perhaps also that they don't fully trust their own, but this is not about allowing anyone in HK to be sent to the mainland.

Mainland China has extradition treaties with some western countries, by the way.

>The request would then be examined by HK courts as is the case in extradition cases.

The keyword here is examined, not trial.

This is how extradition cases are heard everywhere (including Hong Kong, which has extradition treaties with several countries)

They are not trials. They are meant to decide whether the person should be extradited following a request to do so from another country.

Yes, except extradition assumes they will have a fair trial. Which is where the problem lies.

Well, as I mentioned a few Western countries have extradition treaties with China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_China

My impression would be that China isn't going to flip a switch after 50 years and suddenly switch to the Chinese system.

I would imagine they would do it gradually like they're doing now.

That's exactly what they're trying to do. In this case, they could have made the law such that any extradition would have to go through the HK legal system, and mainland China would have to present enough evidence for a HK judge to come to the conclusion that the person should be extradited by HK law. But they didn't as far as I have understood.

So by forcing this law, and forcefully silence the protesters it will be clear that they're not going for the 1 country, 2 systems; but rather 1 country, 2 systems except for ... until it's just 1 country.

There's no evidence that China makes up the law. The HK government draft this law to extradite a criminal who commits murder in Taiwan. The law also excludes a bunch of crimes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com