This article deals with two Parliamentary Petitions on the UK's Parliamentary Website and one independent petition, apparently on a bespoke platform, which is described, with a link, towards the bottom of this article. The two Parliamentary Petitions differ in their prescriptions for action and although both are arguable and valid, it would be logically consistent for an individual to sign only one of them. The blog author makes no recommendation, but for the reader's information he decided to sign the first one described here. The most likely outcome is that both of these petitions will eventually pass the ten thousand signature threshold to compel a response from the UK government, but only one or the other will go the distance and attain the one hundred thousand signature threshold that would make it eligible for a Parliamentary debate. It is impossible at the time of writing to say which of the two petitions this will be.
(It is worth noting that in calling for joint action with the EU, the second petition is exposing itself to a probable veto from the Greek Government and other EU member states which are financially heavily indebted to the PRC and have coincidentally vetoed previous EU proposals for taking action against the PRC.)
First Parliamentary Petition:
Voice opposition to the amendments of the Hong Kong Fugitive Offenders Ordinance
The Hong Kong Government has proposed a bill to amend the
Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, which will allow the Government to
extradite fugitive offenders to countries or regions without Extradition
Agreements with Hong Kong, including the rest of the People’s Republic
of China.
The Bill will remove the legislature’s power to scruntise extradition
arrangements, thereby centralising the decision-making to the
executives. The controversial Bill would also allow the authorities in
the People’s Republic of China to arrest people in Hong Kong, or even
confiscate their properties by issuing Extradition Requests to the Hong
Kong Government.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/263408
Second Parliamentary Petition:
Hong Kong Extradition law: Pressure China with economic sanctions
Upon signing the Sino-British treaty the united kingdom gave
itself a legal and moral obligation to act when china breaks agreements
signed in the treaty. Currently China is clearly interfering in HK
government's decisions to dilute Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy
with this new extradition law.
By seeking joint economic sanctions with the EU and the US, the UK can
pressure Chinese and Hong Kong governments into revoking this bill
which, as can be seen by 15% of the region's population protesting
against the bill, the people of Hong Kong do not want and are fearful of
as China strengthens its ever tightening grip on Hong Kong and
completely obliterates its obligations to maintain a high degree of
autonomy in the region which was laid out in the Sino-British
declaration in 1997.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/264610
British Citizens and United Kingdom residents can click the above links to sign either Parliamentary petition.
It is not a requirement that UK
residents signing these petitions be citizens or on the electoral roll for Parliamentary elections. However, any resident entitled to sign either of the above petitions is probably also
entitled to be on the electoral roll for some local elections. See
link to begin to exercise this right.
The Parliamentary Website is strict about what use can be made of the details you give it, and if you give your details (name, email and postcode) to sign a petition, that is all they can be used for. They might be checked against whatever IP you use to prevent spamming or flaming of the website by hostile persons, but it's extremely unlikely that the details will be abused.
Extended Reasoning:
The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong is just one of a myriad international treaties, trade agreements, investment agreements and mineral-extraction agreements that the People's Republic of China has signed with various international partners, with a recent focus on developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and even those parts of the EU currently in economic crisis. Many of these documents are not really to the benefit of ordinary citizens in the co-signatory countries even when the PRC is keeping to the letter of the agreement it has signed. (The political elite seem to be happy in nearly every case, however. Except in Botswana, which did not sign anything!)
The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong was designed, from the British point of view, primarily to benefit the citizens of Hong Kong, or at least minimise the harm done to them by the (treaty-mandated) handover of Hong Kong back to Chinese rule. The British Government signed this declaration with Communist China (the PRC) in order to honour the treaty it had signed with Imperial China in 1898.
If the PRC is allowed to break, and then get away with breaking, the Joint Declaration, this will have an immediate impact on citizens of Hong Kong, of whom there are currently about 7.4 million. However, with a precedent set for the PRC's Communist leadership to break, or even just bend, the vast number of equivalent agreements they have signed elsewhere, the long-term negative consequences would be felt, directly, by a significant proportion of the world's population and, given the preponderance of agreements concerning natural resources and their exploitation, there could well be environmental and climatic consequences that impact on the entire global population.
The logic of this is that if we are not already citizens of the PRC, we are all Hong-Kongers!
Illustrative Links:
This
link is to a video presented by a South African who has lived (and married) in the PRC, and describes, briefly given the extent of the subject matter, the impact which the PRC's agreements with African countries are having, across the continent and not just in his home country. If this is what is happening now, what is going to happen when the PRC knows
, for sure, that it can get away with breaking the agreements that it has signed?
Perhaps the most galling of the problems which the video presents, is the total abandonment of their own children in Africa by Chinese guest workers. Because the PRC is a Communist country, these workers will have grown up in an educational system which seeks to eliminate ideas of traditional morality as opposed to the "new morality" desired by Karl Marx. People from Hong Kong have not yet had their traditional morality brainwashed out of them and they might one day teach their mainland brethren those values, which would not allow this kind of thing! Provided, of course, that China does not in the meantime impose the mainland's educational system and values on Hong Kong.
(If anything, this video plays down the environmental damage occasioned by logging: it has been alleged elsewhere that after the trees are felled and carried away, the topsoil is also scraped off the bedrock and exported to China. The presenter is visibly distressed to publish even the material he does, because he loves the Chinese people, but not the actions they are being led into.)
The second
link is to a video interview with a prominent opponent of the Ortega regime in Nicaragua
(he's not claiming to
lead anything really. He just says his piece, and it's pretty coherent too.) His principle complaint is that legislation to enable a "Nicaragua Canal" to rival the Panama Canal, was at a constitutional rather than an administrative level and effectively sought to put the entire proposed canal zone outside the jurisdiction of all of Nicaragua's existing environmental and property laws, perhaps even its criminal laws too. This comes close to making the canal zone part of the PRC. If the PRC were one day to treat its agreement with the Ortega government the same way it is currently trying to treat the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, "comes close" would turn into the actual reality of a large slice of land, of necessity bisecting South from North America, becoming de-facto Chinese territory.
(It is also a feature of several development agreements that the PRC has signed in Asia, that zones within the co-signatory country become de-facto Chinese territory. The new Malaysian government is kicking against this, some other governments are not.)
The PRC's strategy for world domination (and People's Liberation Army officers have published academic papers plainly describing it as such) consists of using innumerable small deals, agreements, obscure clauses in contracts and so on, to get governments and companies the world over dancing to the tune of the Chinese Communist Party. We do not have to respond to this with "trade wars", let alone "military confrontation", because these are just the buzz-words which agents and supporters of the PRC will use to try and stop the world from doing
anything.
For further information on the PRC's strategy for domination, see Professor Clive Hamilton's book, "Silent Invasion" which is reviewed
elsewhere on this blog.
What we have to do, is not dance to the PRC's tune! How we don't dance to their tune will have to evolve and be shaped by all the new ways in which they try and make us dance to their tune. Because simple refusal to dance to their tune strikes at the very core of their strategy and by-passes the defences they have built against the approach currently being taken by President Trump.
Another petition on the same subject:
This is a
link to a petition "Stand With HK". Which is worthy (worth a read for the background information, too) and which the blog author has signed. However, because it was created by a Hong Kong resident, it is not and cannot be a
Parliamentary Petition and this means that the UK Government is not obliged to pay it any attention, even if it garners many signatures. In addition, because it is on a non-government platform it is potentially vulnerable to being shut down, and its results may simply never get published if the account holders on that platform are detained. Which those persons themselves acknowledge to be a real possibility.
If either Parliamentary Petition gets 10,000 signatures, the UK Government has to provide and publish a response, and if it gets 100,000 signatures, an independent Parliamentary Committee will consider it for a debate in the House of Commons. The only normal reason for refusal is if a similar debate has been held already or is pending, in which case: job done! But extra signatures add extra force, regardless of Commons debates. Once published, a Parliamentary Petition is all but impossible to extinguish from the public record and the public domain, which may be very important in this instance.
NB: Quote from the second parliamentary petition: "which was laid out in the Sino-British
declaration in 1997." The Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong was
signed on the 19th of December 1984 and
came into effect in 1997.
