By The Hon. David Kilgour on January 7, 2018
Negotiating a free trade agreement with an increasingly totalitarian and plutocratic party-state in China, which treats its Tibetan, Falun Gong, Uyghur, Christian, farm, urban worker and other communities appallingly,should be unthinkable for any democratic country.
Canadian Clive Ansley, who practised law in Shanghai for 14 years until 2003, notes that its Communist party has long operated outside and above the law:
China is a brutal police state…There is a current saying amongst Chinese lawyers and judges who truly believe in the Rule of Law…: ‘Those who hear the case do not make the judgment; those who make the judgment have not heard the case’…. Nothing which has transpired in the ‘courtroom’ has any impact on the ‘judgment’.
