Then he begged Hongkongers for forgiveness, bowed a second time and left in a white seven-seater vehicle, without taking questions from the dozens of reporters present.
Watching Chan’s release on television, Poon’s father told friends the scenes deeply saddened the family and reminded them all over again of the senseless killing of their only daughter. A family friend said Poon’s father just wanted “things to be over as soon as possible” – and for justice to be served.
A fugitive, frozen in time
Chan’s pledge to surrender gave a sliver of hope that the family might yet get the closure they had so desperately longed for. At his side that day was Reverend Canon Peter Koon Ho-ming, a senior Anglican priest who had been visiting him in prison every week and had helped persuade Chan to surrender to the Taiwanese authorities. The priest’s presence made Chan’s willingness to repent seem genuine, but in a development that piled only more pain onto Poon’s parents, the worlds of politics and justice were once more about to collide.
At the time of Chan’s release, Taiwan’s presidential election was looming and the incumbent Tsai Ing-wen had made the issue a staple on her campaign trail. Her Democratic Progressive Party, which leans toward favoring independence from mainland China, had played up the Hong Kong protests as an example of how Beijing was encroaching upon and curtailing the city’s freedoms. It was a cautionary tale, she warned, of what might happen were Taiwan to reunify with the mainland.
Meanwhile, Taiwan and Hong Kong officials were also bickering over how to send Chan back to the self-ruled island, and the argument became increasingly bitter. At one point, Tsai’s government had even suggested Chan’s offer to surrender might be an elaborate plot, hatched by Beijing, aimed at circumventing the need for formal negotiations between Hong Kong and Taipei (something that they alleged could be seen as implying recognition of Taiwan’s claims to self-rule).
Given the political sensitivities, Koon said Chan felt he would not get a fair trial in Taiwan until after the election in January 2020. So Chan would hold back on handing himself in, at least for the time being.
Tsai won the election handsomely with 57.1 per cent of the vote, the highest winning margin ever achieved by her party. Most analysts saw her stance on the Hong Kong protests as the main reason.
Yet even with the election over, the time for justice had not arrived. The next month, the outbreak of the coronavirus prompted Taiwan to restrict incoming travel from Hong Kong. The chances of Chan’s surrender seemed suddenly more complicated than ever.
By now two years had passed since Poon’s death, during which time the political landscapes of both Taiwan and Hong Kong had been transformed, yet somehow the prime suspect in her killing still appeared no closer to facing a murder charge.
At the time of publication, Chan remained in Hong Kong as if his case were frozen in time, an inconvenient reminder of a period some would prefer to forget.
As Reverend Koon put it, life for Chan was “at a standstill.” For Poon’s parents, so too was their search for justice.
Kill bill: The law that tore a city apart
Jeffie Lam
The birth of Carrie Lam’s extradition bill was how the protests began but even its death could not bring them to an end.
There were two schools of thought as to the motivation behind Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s unpopular extradition bill and why she so doggedly stuck to it even in the face of unprecedented opposition.
One explanation, the one offered by Lam herself, was that she had been moved by the plight of two Hongkongers seeking justice for their murdered daughter, Poon Hiu-wing, who was killed in February 2018 while holidaying in Taipei with her boyfriend Chan Tong-kai.
Chan, the prime suspect in the killing, had managed to return to Hong Kong and was effectively thumbing his nose at the justice system, having admitted killing Poon to Hong Kong police, safe in the knowledge there was little they could do about it.
Authorities could not extradite him to Taiwan to face a murder charge as the two jurisdictions lacked a treaty. Instead he could be charged only with more minor offenses committed on local soil – theft and money laundering – and could be freed before 2019 was out. Empathizing with Poon’s parents, Lam stepped in to prevent a travesty of justice.
That’s one explanation. But there was another, less charitable view. It held that the ambitious Lam saw in the case a perfect opportunity to please her political masters in Beijing by delivering something they had wanted ever since the handover from British rule in 1997: a rethink of colonial-era laws that had expressly ruled out extraditions between Hong Kong and mainland China.
As things stood, Hong Kong had extradition agreements with just 20 jurisdictions, covering 46 crimes from murder to tax evasion and 15 corporate violations, and neither Taiwan nor mainland China were among them. A canny politician might be able to kill two birds with one stone.
Why the rush?
On February 12, 2019, almost a year to the day since Poon’s death, the extradition bill was unveiled. It proposed changing the relevant laws so that fugitives could be transferred to jurisdictions outside the 20 places Hong Kong had agreements with.
These transfers would be decided on a case-by-case basis and would follow a set process once a request was received. First, the chief executive would decide whether to seek an arrest warrant. Then, if she did so, the Hong Kong courts would decide whether to grant that warrant.
There were a couple of other provisos: only crimes that carried a sentence of at least one year’s imprisonment would be considered and the subjects of extradition requests would have the right to challenge them before the courts.
The government was in a hurry to get the bill passed. So it skipped the lengthy consultation period that would normally have involved months’ worth of public discussion and instead gave the city’s residents just 20 days to give their feedback.
Why the rush? Well, again there were two schools of thought.
One explanation, the one offered by Lam, was that the Taiwan murder case meant time was of the essence. She was backed on this by pro-establishment and pro-Beijing political parties that seemed confident that public sympathy for Poon’s grieving parents would mean that the bill would sail through the legislative process smoothly.
But there was another, more cynical view. This was that Lam was trying to rush the bill through before anyone had time to digest the profound implications it would have for Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China.
Time to act?
Supporters of the bill said there were yawning gaps in the justice system, which it could plug. If Hong Kong had extradition agreements with just 20 jurisdictions, they pointed out, that meant the city was rolling out the welcome mat for fugitives from more than 170 others. And many such fugitives already lived in the city, among them convicted criminals from Taiwan and 300 people on the run from mainland China. The loophole needed to be closed if the city was to uphold its own criminal justice system, they said.
And the mainland had turned over about 200 criminal suspects to Hong Kong since 1997, so why could the city not return the courtesy? After all, Beijing had signed extradition treaties with 50 countries, 37 of which had been ratified, and they didn’t seem to have a problem. As senior counsel and former director of public prosecutions Grenville Cross put it, the bill was needed to prevent Hong Kong from becoming “China’s criminal sanctuary.”
Mistrust of the mainland
Others