The Pulse：Interview with Carmen Cano, Head of the European Union Office to HK & Macau on Brexit & Oc

There’s been a flurry of activity between the European Union and China recently with a major summit seeking to reset relations and some marked divisions emerging in Europe as to how China’s emerging strength should be addressed. Meanwhile the EU has also been looking at events in Hong Kong and expressing misgivings over a direction of travel which includes the introduction of an extradition law that potentially threatens the security of overseas companies and their personnel doing business in the HKSAR. And then there’s the elephant in the room - Brexit casting its ever confusing shadow over the future of the EU. With us in the studio is the Head of the European Union Office to Hong Kong and Macau, Carmen Cano.

At 1.45 am on the 27th of September 2014, Benny Tai announced that Occupy Central had begun, building on a two-day protest during which students had occupied the streets outside the government headquarters in Tamar. The sit-in ended up lasting 79 days and spread to other areas. It was an act of civil disobedience, involving hundreds of thousands of people demanding political reforms and the universal suffrage Hong Kong had been promised in the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. Scholars, students, legislators and other members of the public have since been arrested and prosecuted for their involvement in the movement. Nearly five years later, on Tuesday this week, nine leaders of the movement were found guilty of a number of public nuisance charges. Hong Kong’s last governor Chris Patten says he found it “appallingly divisive to use anachronistic common law charges in a vengeful pursuit of political events”. The central government has supported the court’s ruling and the move “to punish, according to law, the main plotters of the illegal Occupy”.