Rear Window | Game of Appeals: Caution and tact highly recommended

Severo Portela

Not knowing whether the Public Prosecution Office has filed an appeal against Sulu Sou and Scott Chiang sentencing as we draft this column… we would rather look into the affair from an angle as distant as can be from the judicial. Not exactly a direct command from the Bible’s “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”, but a profane inspiration for the separation of politics and the courts.

The Legislative Assembly (AL) managed to forge a negative collusion in order to suspend the immunity of one of its own lawmakers to stand trial on charges of aggravated disobedience. Lawmaker Sulu Sou was to be shamed in a sense by a full independent court who was to condemn to a not-so-token monetary penalty legislator for a crime (illegal assembly) other than the one that led to the suspension from the AL floor.

The court ruling should be sufficient to raise a political answer from Ho Iat Seng and the Legislative Assembly as a whole, in the form of, at least, a plain apology to Sulu Sou’s political ordeal and the public proclamation that he is to be automatically  reinstated as a lawmaker. Knowing the house, it will be asking too much, but at some point the paternalistic rule has to go down in a political assembly of formal equals.

Perhaps again in the ignorance of the outcome of the game of appeals, Ho Iat Seng, the alleged strong candidate to run for the office of Chief Executive Chui Sai On, could find other ways to call the suspension of maverick lawmaker Sulu Sou a “technical tie”, and call it dead heat. Outside the realm of the courts in the privileged ground of politics could sound an allegorical equivalent if the defendant is to be acquitted and exempted from all further prosecution.

We would not be lying in the most obvious way if we state that without Sulu Sou, the discussion of the new judiciary framework will be impaired, given the abundance of legal expertise at the MSAR Legislative Assembly. The New Macau Association (ANM) rookie proved himself to be a real political talent in his short stint as a pro-democracy directly-elected legislator whose performance, we dare to say, was well-noted in civil society and good enough to fish supporters in waters that were traditionally more conservative turf.

For instance, take the crematorium brief. Kai Fong put up a petition to oppose Sa Kong Municipal Cemetery as the recipient of MSAR’s first crematorium because it would be too close to residents and cause unacceptable pollution. It is not difficult to figure that any location would hardly be acceptable.

However, the Municipal Authority is sure that Macau residents have been long calling for a crematorium and has figures to demonstrate that longing: 2017 saw 1,600 bodies transferred to Zhuhai; approximately double the figure in 2007.

The thing is, the regulatory frame requires a crematorium to be installed exclusively in one of the MSAR’s six cemeteries. But…if this regulation were to be amended…!

The same problem read by ANM and Sulu Sou has further depth. This is not an issue of location of a crematorium: it is a serious problem relating to how the city will comprehensively solve its burial problems. Fewer words can often say more.