Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam questioned whether the US has violated human rights by releasing Hong Kong officials’ personal information when the US treasury department announced sanctions against the latter.
Lam noted that her US visa will expire in 2026. “It seems I can voluntarily apply for a cancellation now as I do not yearn for that country at all,” Lam said in a post on Facebook on Saturday.
The US Department of the Treasury on Friday placed sanctions on 11 officials in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, including the city’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, for “undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and restricting freedom of expression of or assembly by the citizens of Hong Kong.”
The department also released some officials’ passport numbers and addresses while emptying some others’.
However, what is awkward is that the department mistook Lam’s address for that of the Chief Secretary in the Victoria House on Barker Road.
“A super power actually made such a stupid mistake. Did the US get these materials from the Civic Party?” former Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying also ridiculing the mistake on Facebook on Saturday.
Hanscom Smith, the US Consul General representing the US in Hong Kong and Macao, met the pan-democratic Civic Party chairman Alan Leong Kah-kit and Leong’s party colleague Alvin Yeung Ngok-kiu at Leong’s law offices on Tuesday, which is seen as a test and challenge for the national security law for the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR).
“Did the US officials not know that the Chief Executive should live in the Government House on Upper Albert Road?” Lam questioned in the Saturday post.
She also questioned that, for officials whose passport numbers were not revealed, “don’t they even hold a HKSAR passport?”
Lam said she was not surprised at the US governments’ carelessness as the US even misspelled Edward Snowden’s name in all the documents they handed over in that year they requested his extradition from the regional government.
Lam said she believed that the address the US department used for her was what they got when Lam applied for her US visa in June 2016, as the Chief Secretary of Hong Kong, a post she had served from 2012 to 2017.
For those whose information was not revealed in the sanctions list, Lam said that maybe it is because these officials have not applied for US visas in recent years.
Handing these personal application materials to the treasury department for purposes rather than entry, “I doubt whether this behavior has violated human rights,” Lam said.
Officials in Hong Kong expressed strong opposition to the sanctions on Saturday, stressing they will never be intimidated by such an act of hooliganism, which will have no impact on them.
The central government’s liaison office in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region also expressed opposition and strong condemnation to the sanctions on the same day.
Carrie Lam File photo:Xinhua
