Lee Cheuk-Yan, General Secretary of the HKCTU trade union federation In this month of May 2020, when the general lock-down has made the celebration of May Day virtually impossible, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, a region of the People’s Republic of China, has summoned Lee Cheuk-Yan, General Secretary of the HKCTU trade union federation, to court under the charge of “participating in a public demonstration on August 31, 2019, which violated the Decree on public order of Hong Kong”. The decree that the Carrie Lam government is using is the upshot of the emergency rules which the British colonial government had issued against the seamen’s strikes back in 1922 and the 1967 workers’ strikes. It is in the name of this public order that over 7,000 demonstrators have been arrested since June 2019 and 1,000 have already been sentenced! Lee Cheuk-yan appeared in court on May 5 and is summoned again to appear on May 18. When tens of thousand workers have
[...]