Regarding the post on the prosecutor who appeared to be soft on sex offenders, the prosecutor involved, Kevin Zervos, has a letter in the SCMP yesterday. It’s no surprise that he’s claiming that the SCMP quoted him out of context.  But what he writes in this letter is convincing.

At no time was I urging compassion for sex offenders. Nor was I responding to complaints that the city’s prosecutors and judges were overly lenient with sex offenders.

I was generally commenting on the use of the bind-over procedure and was asked for my comments about one specific case which involved a young female reporter who was hugged from behind by a man in costume at the Rugby Sevens. It appeared that the man was drunk.

He later wrote a letter of apology to the woman. In that case, after anxious scrutiny, and having considered all the circumstances of the case, including the seriousness of the offence, the woman’s views and the man’s remorse, it was decided that he should be given a bind over.

The woman fully understood the bind-over procedure after it was explained to her. She was keen to ensure that the man did not repeat his conduct and showed respect towards women in the future. This was stressed in our letter to the man’s lawyers.

I did not and am not advocating compassion for first-time sex offenders regardless of the offence and its severity. Last year, only 16 out of 646 indecent assault cases in the Magistrates’ Courts were dealt with by way of bind over.

Offences such as rape, sexual violence cases, sexual offences against those aged under 16 are dealt with with the full force of the law.

I am strongly committed to protecting victims of sexual offences, especially of sexual violence, and I have initiated a programme to address human exploitation cases.

I am removing him from my list of idiots in charge here.

An update on Hong Kong’s useless new cruise ship terminal, which hosted its first ship this week – and now goes dark until the next ship arrives in November.

Tourists who arrived with the first cruise vessel to dock at the new Kai Tak terminal gave a mixed review of their experience in the city, with some complaining of transportation confusion, taxi overcharging and too little time to take in the attractions.

The one-day stay of Mariner of the Seas was expected to deliver a bump in retail revenue, but it turns out not all the visitors were big spenders.

Aileen Webber, 62, from Australia, went to the Megabox mall on Wednesday night. “We were told it’s a good one, but there wasn’t much to see,” said “There was not enough transportation information. We wasted a lot of time at The Peak looking for a bus back.”

Sandra Cooper, 62, from Britain said she had a good experience yesterday but Wednesday night “was chaos”. She and her husband waited 30 minutes on Wednesday night for other passengers to board a shuttle bus leaving the cruise terminal. The bus was arranged by the terminal operator.

There were grumbles about the taxi service that night. Taxis were not allowed into the terminal at a point and a long queue formed.

Lai Ming-hung, chairman of the Taxi and Public Light Bus Concern Group, said he took a taxi and arrived at the terminal at 7.20pm, but security guards informed him taxis were not allowed inside. He made an enquiry with a Transport Department officer, and was told at 8.10pm that taxis could enter.

The terminal operator said many taxis were unwilling to enter the terminal with an empty car, but later admitted that the staff of one of the security companies wrongly thought taxis needed a permit to enter the terminal.

One British tourist said she was charged HK$400 by a taxi driver for a journey she later learned should cost around HK$70. “It’s very, very disgusting,” she said.

Lai suggested terminal staff could assist tourists taking taxis, as occurs at the airport. They would record taxi plate numbers and give tourists an idea how much their journey should cost.

They didn’t already know they would need to do that? They thought, oh sure, people coming off a boat who have never been here before and have just 12 hours here and are being dropped off in the middle of nowhere are gonna be fine on their own?

From today’s SCMP:

Beijing reserves the right not to accept the person chosen by universal suffrage to govern Hong Kong, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has warned.

“The possibility exists for Beijing and Hong Kong people not seeing eye-to-eye on the best candidate to lead Hong Kong. This is another issue we need to tackle under ‘one country, two systems’,” he said.

He noted that Beijing had occasionally declined to accept officials nominated by the city’s leader, indicating that “it reserves the same right over the chief executive position”.

Former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang took issue with Leung’s comments.

“There is no justification for [Leung] to paint such a negative and alarmist picture to an overseas audience,” she said. “It is his job to ensure that the necessary changes to Hong Kong’s electoral arrangements are in place … As long as [changes to electoral] arrangements provide for an election that is free and fair, Hong Kong people can be trusted to use their votes wisely.”

People. Hong Kong is part of China. The notion that Hong Kong will get true universal suffrage without there being massive internal changes in China first is a myth.  ”One country two systems” is a fairy tale to read to your kids at bed time.

The latest example, from today’s SCMP:

The city’s chief prosecutor says victims of indecent assault in some cases should show their attackers compassion if it is their first offence.

“Men will actually respect women more if they see women showing compassion to them and realising they are better off without a conviction,” Director of Public Prosecutions Kevin Zervos said in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Morning Post.

“There’s this boy-girl thing in life,” he said. “You have young men and women out there interacting socially. And when an incident happens and a man gets carried away … is it social misbehaviour or is it a crime?

Zervos was responding to complaints to the Post that the city’s prosecutors and judges were overly lenient with sex offenders. His comment also follows Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok’s remark last month that women should drink less alcohol to avoid being raped.

Linda Wong Sau-yung, the director of the Association Concerning Sexual Violence Against Women, is concerned that if victims think prosecutors are going to be lenient towards sexual offenders they will not bother going to the police. Only 50 per cent of victims report assaults and rapes, according to the association.

Obviously it’s not as dire a situation here as in India or South Africa. Even so, it’s distressing to read something like this.

All the way back in 2009, I wrote this post about the government’s plans to build a new ocean terminal at Kai Tak. The key point there, one that seems all but forgotten now, was that the government originally asked the cruise lines to pay for it but after they ran the numbers, they backed off because they didn’t think it would be profitable. So our fearless leaders went ahead and built the useless thing anyway.

So now we’re stuck with this ugly thing taking up a huge chunk of the harbor.

(The only photo I have of this thing is this one from March, taken from the window of a speeding bus on a hazy day. Three months later, it doesn’t look all that much different except at night, when they make it even uglier by lighting it up like a manic depressive Christmas tree.)

It’s about to open. And guess what?  300 days out of 365, it’s going to be empty.

The Standard reports:

The Kai Tak cruise terminal will be deserted for more than 300 days in its first year of operation unless the government can get more operators to divert their ships to Hong Kong or arrange a host of special events.

Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Gregory So Kam-leung said projections show that only 20 liners will call at Kai Tak from its soft opening next week to the middle of 2014, for a total of 37 berthing days.

The terminal will have its soft opening on Wednesday to welcome the first ocean liner, Mariner of the Seas, which is carrying more than 3,000 passengers.

The next berthing at the terminal will be at the end of October and early November as a result of a joint promotion by the Hong Kong Tourism Board and Taiwan’s tourism authorities for the Mariner to ferry passengers between the two.

Oh, by the way, not only is the building ugly, it’s leaking.

However, construction is continuing in many parts of the terminal and leaks can frequently be found within the building.

So said the terminal was affected by the heavy rains on May 22 when the black rainstorm warning was hoisted.

Yeah, it rained, which it never does in Hong Kong, and I guess caught them by surprise. “You wanted it big, ugly and waterproof?”

By the way, “So” is Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Gregory So Kam-leung. So’s qualifications for the position seem to come down to the fact that he’s a lawyer and a member of the pro-Beijing DAB party. I wonder if he ever staged any horse shows?

So estimates the economic benefits from the terminal could range from HK$1.5 billion to HK$2.6 billion a year.

How to realize these benefits?

So said the building can be used to provide spacious areas for exhibitions, conventions, conferences or even wedding receptions.

Because between HKCEC, KITEC and Asiaworld, plus the dozens of ballrooms and function rooms in hotels, we don’t have any convention or conference space.  And certainly there’s a desperate lack of spaces where one could hold a wedding with 10,000 guests.

I’d appreciate some of whatever it is he’s smoking.

The cruise terminal cost at least HK$8 billion to build. The “consortium” running the operation will pay the government rent of HK$13 million (plus a percentage of the operator’s gross receipts as variable rent) for ten years. How one gets from that to $2.6 billion per year is a mystery to me. How this “consortium” got this for an annual rent that is less than jewelry stores pay for 1 month’s rent on Canton Road is a mystery as well.

Said consortium is made up 60% by Worldwide Flight Services (owned by French company Vinci Group), 20% by Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., and 20% by a subsidiary of Shun Tak Holdings Limited.  Ah, Shun Tak. Good ole Stanley Ho.

As usual, no one will be held accountable for this boondoggle, which has cost billions of tax payer dollars.

I’ll leave aside any comments on June 4th (been posting some stuff on Twitter and Facebook) and the SCMP’s coverage of same. But here’s another article in that paper that drove me batty today.

Some movie theater in HK has started a series showing rock concert films. The article only mentions one – a concert film with The Doors. The writer decided the hook to hang this piece on was to contrast it with another series of opera performances shown in local cinemas. He’s so desperate to put some sort of spin on it, rather than merely report on it (and I’ll leave aside the question of whether or not this is something worth reporting on) that here’s what he comes up with:

If the classical performances lured more mature audiences, then Rock Legend is meant for a younger set – albeit with a non-contemporary taste in music.

A “younger set”? I mean, okay, there are some people under 30 who are interested in discovering this music, but wouldn’t it be fair to say that most fans of rock from the 1960s are in their 50′s and 60′s?  Or am I now a part of the younger set?  Wishful thinking.

Or, who knows, you’ll be shocked to see a new group in the cinema lobby: Hong Kong’s ageing rock ‘n’ rollers.

So the inference is that people of a certain age who like classical music are “mature” while people of the same age who like classic rock are just “ageing” and, presumably immature.

I know, this is a nothing article, nothing to get upset about, maybe it’s just my mood tonight. But it’s frustrating that the SCMP can’t even do a puff piece without trying to pump it up into something it isn’t.

And while I’m on a rant … just updating iPhone apps in iTunes. There’s a new update for the Chrome web browser.  Which I am told contains “age restricted material” and I must click to prove I am over 17 years of age. A web browser. Age restricted material. A web browser. Seriously. A web browser.

Okay, go ahead, color me cranky, I don’t care.

Political refugees in Hong Kong get very little attention and it’s hard to find out a lot of information on the situation. The United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees – the UNHCR aka The UN Refugee Agency – barely mentions Hong Kong on its web site.  But at the moment there are somewhere around 1,500 “official” refugees in Hong Kong and their lives are not easy, to say the least. From the wiki:

Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies that “everyone has the right to seek and enjoy asylum abroad from persecution.” At the end of April 2006, the UN Refugee Agency, also called the UNHCR stated that there were 1473 asylum seekers in Hong Kong waiting for a decision. 24.7% of them were women and 23.9% were children. The Hong Kong UNCHR receives 150 to 160 applications a month. Ninety percent of the asylum seekers in Hong Kong come from south Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippine, Nepal), 9% come from Africa (Congo, Liberia..) and 1% come from other regions. There are few Non Governmental Organizations who take care of these refugees in Hong Kong. The most active one is Christian Action which provides shelter, food, counsel and medical aid. RSD Watch estimated that of 798 cases decided by UNHCR in Hong Kong in 2004, there was an 18% success rate. Some cases can make an appeal, but due to the UNCHR’s backlog, some asylum seekers spend years in HK waiting for their case to be processed.

These refugees receive a monthly allowance of HK$1,400 per person from the government. That’s around US$180. That is supposed to cover rent, food – everything. They’re not allowed to work, at least not legally. And it can take years for their situations to be resolved and to find a country willing to offer them asylum. (In April 2013, a Sri Lankan refugee, a “torture claimant,” received a temporary right to work from the Hong Kong government. He was just about to appeal a legal decision denying him that work permit and then received one based on the “discretion” of the immigration director. This man has been in Hong Kong since December, 2000.)

On Saturday, a volunteer with the Christian Action Agency brought a group of six refugees (along with some of their families and friends) to PASM Workshop. This agency is teaching them skills that will help them find employment once they are resettled and in this case, this group is interested in photography.  5 of the 6 are from Sri Lanka, the 6th from India. One person in the group had experience as a professional photographer, the others were relatively new to it. Some of them brought some really ambitious ideas to our studio and it was exciting to watch them turn these ideas into photographs.

June 20th is World Refugee Day and there will be an exhibition of these photos (and more!) at the Fringe Club.

I did have a chance to talk with most of the people who came to the studio. It was amazing to learn that many of them had been in Hong Kong for as long as ten years waiting for their situations to be resolved. But despite their difficult conditions, this was a high spirited, warm and friendly group and it was great to have a chance to meet them and hear directly from them about their lives. I got the impression that while their lives were not easy here, they still saw it as an improvement over what they had left behind, and they were unanimously optimistic for their future.  I would love to share photos of them but I neglected to ask them for permission and given their circumstances, I think it’s best not to post them here.

If you’d like to learn more about the refugee situation in Hong Kong and what you can do to help, check out:

• Christian Action - Hong Kong Refugees program
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – Get Involved

Two news items this morning caught my eye.

The first is small scale idiocy. A Mr. or Ms. Chow gave his or her domestic helper $50 to buy pork. The helper bought $35 worth of pork and put the $15 in her pocket, thereby denying Chow $15 worth of chow. Chow discovered that $15 (that’s about US$1.95) was missing and called the police. And the police proceeded to do what they do. For 15 bucks. Until finally a magistrate asked the police if they had something better to do with their time than to fuss over $15, at which point the charges were dropped. The magistrate asked the prosecution if they had considered other options. The news doesn’t report on the reply.

That’s small scale idiocy. Here’s idiocy on a larger scale. Last year the government raised the stamp fee on home purchases in an attempt to cool down the housing market.  This resulted in, among other things, a stampede to buy up car park spaces – as an investment. This worked out about as well as you might expect. In other words, people are losing money – big time.

A buyer named Li nearly halved the purchase price to sell his parking space at Pristine Villa in Sha Tin for HK$250,000, after buying it from Sun Hung Kai Properties (0016) in November for HK$470,000.

“I would never have thought that no one would be willing to buy my space, even when it was put up for auction,” Li said.

“I just wanted to pocket a quick profit.”

The sentiment for Hong Kong Garden is the most disastrous, said Billy Cheng Chi-kuen, Midland Realty sales manager for the area.

“Around 600 car parking spaces at the estate were sold by the developer but none could be resold in the secondhand market,” Cheng said.

The supply glut at Hong Kong Garden has dragged rents down to as little as HK$400 per month, compared with the HK$1,800 charged by Chinachem before. It is even lower than the HK$900 rent charged at a nearby temporary car park.

Hong Kong Garden is in Sham Tseng, which is somewhere between Tsuen Wan and Tuen Mun. It’s a bunch of apartment towers and a shopping mall and nothing else. And people actually thought other people would line up to buy parking spots there.  Some people did make a profit – those who sold off the spots for a modest gain immediately after buying them.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” goes the old saying.

And then there’s the bit about the 15 year old Chinese tourist who had to write his name on a 3,500 year old temple.

It says “Ding Jinhao was here.” Was he ever.

Granted, this is an isolated thing. I’m sure millions of Chinese tourists have visited this temple and most would have behaved quite well. But this thing is just jaw-droppingly stupid on so many levels.