Hong Kong a 'police state,' prominent protesters say

WASHINGTON - Hong Kong is a "police state" where officers -- once dubbed "Asia's finest" -- are conducting abuses in the service of the city's pro-Beijing leadership, prominent voices in the global financial hub's weeks-long protest movement told AFP Saturday.

The comments came as riot police and demonstrators in Hong Kong fought brief skirmishes Saturday near the Chinese border. 

They were the latest clashes during more than three months of demonstrations to protest stuttering freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.

"Within these three-and-a-half months we have seen the police in Hong Kong getting totally out of control," activist and pop star Denise Ho said in an interview with AFP.

"Hong Kong has become a police state where the government is hiding behind the police force and refusing to find solutions to the present crisis." 

Well-known figures in the leaderless protest movement have visited the US, Germany, Taiwan and Australia to raise awareness.

"Our police system has been corrupted into a personal tool for Carrie Lam to maintain her power and to abuse the public power to torture the people, to silence the people," another activist, Brian Leung, said in the AFP interview.

He was referring to the leader of the former British colony, who was not directly elected but appointed by an overwhelmingly Beijing-friendly committee.

On Friday Amnesty International accused Hong Kong police of using excessive force.

"In an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong's security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests," said Nicholas Bequelin, the watchdog's East Asia Director.

"This has included arbitrary arrests and retaliatory violence against arrested persons in custody, some of which has amounted to torture."

Leung told AFP "there are countless incidents of such brutality and the worst of the situation is the police has systematically concealed their identity, are not showing their faces... which makes accountability impossible." 

He alleged that some injured protesters do not go to the hospital because they fear that could lead to police getting information about them.

"So we do not know the exact scale and numbers of those injuries and we are sure that the police, if they continue such brutality, it will be only a matter of time before some citizen might suffer from fatal injuries," Leung added.

Millions took to Hong Kong's streets beginning in June but small groups of hardcore protesters have set fires, stormed the city's legislature, and hurled rocks and petrol bombs at officers, who have fired back with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Police say they have exercised restraint.

Joshua Wong, another activist, said he is one of 200 among the 1,500 arrested to face prosecution. 

A 12-year-old child was also detained, and "even first aider, doctors or nurse in the protest zone, they will still be arrested by riot police without any legitimate reason," he said.

"Hong Kong (has) transformed from a modern global city to a police state with police violence," Wong told AFP.

Among their demands, activists want an independent probe of alleged police brutality.

The protests began against a now-scrapped plan to allow extraditions to the authoritarian Chinese mainland but grew into a wider campaign for democracy, fuelled by animosity towards the police.

Under a deal that outlined Hong Kong's return to China from British colonial rule in 1997, Hong Kong enjoys liberties and rights not seen on the mainland, but protesters say freedoms are being eroded by Beijing.

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Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong arrested ahead of weekend protests

HONG KONG - Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong was arrested on Friday ahead of another weekend of planned protests in the Chinese-ruled city which is grappling with its biggest political crisis since its handover to Beijing more than 2 decades ago.

Wong, the face of Hong Kong's push for full democracy during protests in 2014 that paralyzed parts of the city for 79 days, was released from jail in June after serving a five-week term for contempt of court.

"He was suddenly pushed into a private car on the street," Wong's political party Demosisto, which advocates for greater democracy in Hong Kong, said on its official Twitter account.

"He has now been escorted to the police headquarters in Wan Chai," it said, adding its lawyers were working on the case.

Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Unrest in Hong Kong escalated in mid-June over a now-suspended extradition bill that would have allowed people to be sent to mainland China for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts.

It has since evolved into calls for greater democracy under the "one country, 2 systems" formula, which guarantees freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland, including an independent judiciary.

On Thursday, China brought fresh troops into Hong Kong in what it described as a routine rotation of the garrison.

Chinese state media stressed the troop movement was routine and Asian and Western diplomats watching the People's Liberation Army (PLA) forces in the former British colony had been expecting it.

Chinese soldiers stationed in Hong Kong are not there merely for symbolic purposes and they will have "no reason to sit on their hands" if the situation in the city worsens, an editorial in the China Daily newspaper said on Friday.

Police have refused permission for a pro-democracy march on Saturday, but organizers have appealed against the decision.

The protest would mark 5 years since Beijing ruled out universal suffrage for Hong Kong and comes as Hong Kong faces its first recession in a decade, with all its pillars of growth under stress.

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Thailand bars entry to teenage HK activist whose supporters blame China

BANGKOK/HONG KONG - A Hong Kong student activist who helped organize pro-democracy protests in the Chinese-ruled city in 2014 was detained on arrival in Thailand on Wednesday, immigration officials said, with his supporters accusing China of being behind the move.

Bespectacled Joshua Wong, 19, was detained in Bangkok where he had been invited to speak at two universities about Hong Kong's "Umbrella Movement" street protests and on setting up his political party, Demosisto.

The protests in Hong Kong, the former British colony which returned to Chinese rule in 1997, presented Communist Party rulers in Beijing with one of their biggest political headaches in decades.

Wong was given 80 hours of community service by a Hong Kong court in August on a charge of unlawful assembly for taking part in a sit-in at the height of the protests in the Asian financial hub.

Thailand has been ruled by a military junta since a 2014 coup which was widely condemned by the West. Since then, the generals running Thailand have forged closer ties with Beijing.

Reuters was unable to reach the Thai government for comment on Wong's detention.

Wong said in a Facebook post on Tuesday night that he was concerned about his trip to Bangkok.

"We all know Thailand is not politically stable... It is also clear that it is close to the Chinese Communist Party," he said.

Wong was denied entry by Malaysia in May 2015 when he was due to give a series of talks on democracy in China.

Wong was invited by Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Political Science to speak on the 40th anniversary of the bloody crackdown by the Thai army on student protesters. Organizers said he was detained at Bangkok's main airport on Wednesday morning.

Immigration officials confirmed to Reuters that Wong was prevented from entering Thailand and would be sent back to Hong Kong. Officials said they were under orders not to speak to the media about why Wong had been refused entry.

Human Rights Watch condemned Wong's detention.

"Thailand's arrest of Joshua Wong, a well-known pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong, sadly suggests that Bangkok is willing to do Beijing's bidding," Sophie Richardson, China Director for Human Rights Watch, said in an email.

Demosisto, the political party that Wong heads in Hong Kong, also called for his release.

Thailand, Southeast Asia's second-biggest economy, is slowly recovering from the events of 2014, when months of street protests and the coup almost brought economic activity to a standstill.

Since then, the military has clamped down on dissent and banned political protests.

--- with additional reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre

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