Public Trust in Hong Kong’s Judicial Independence Hangs in the balance

Dr Man Yee Karen Lee
Senior Lecturer in Law
Asia Pacific College of Business and Law
Charles Darwin University, Australia

Hong Kong politics has been in the news since 2019, when a so-called “Extradition Bill” – which would allow criminal suspects to be sent to Mainland China for trial – set off a wave of mass protests, dubbed the “Anti-extradition Bill Movement”, which lasted into early 2020. The initial peaceful protests later descended into often violent running street battles between the police and young protesters, which led to accusations of police brutality and saw public trust in the force – once deemed Asia’s finest – plunging. On the other hand, the Hong Kong government’s surprise turn to invoke a colonial-era emergency law to ban face masks – a symbol of resistance at the time – has further alienated frontline activists, most of them young people. Anti-government protests have become a collective memory since the emergence of Covid-19, and the imposition of the National Security Law on the territory by China on 1 July 2020. However, underneath the façade of stability is a society that remains restive and grows ever more distrustful of the authorities, which in recent times include, of all things, the courts.

Handling Criminal Cases: On the Interactions between Danish Criminal Justice Agencies and Defendants, Prisoners, and Victims

Louise Victoria Johansen
Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen

Social & Legal Studies recently published my article, ‘‘Impressed’ by Feelings – How Judges Perceive Defendants’ Emotional Expressions in Danish Courtrooms’, in the April 2019 print issue. The article presents some of my findings from a 3-year project about the articulation of differences within the Danish criminal justice system. It considers how judges perceive defendants’ emotions, and how these perceptions are influenced by expectations and evaluations according to defendants’ different social positions. Judges meet defendants with specific norms about how one should express feelings depending on one’s age, gender, ethnicity, etc. Using emotions as a lens gave my project the possibility of studying how categorization processes happen through specific social situations such as court trials, and through linguistic and bodily communication. The concept of ‘emotion’ thus offers a dynamic approach to intersecting categories such as gender, age, etc. by highlighting the processes through which they come about.

In the following, I reflect on the broader project that this article was embedded in, and subsequently, what the project brought with it.