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TENS OF THOUSANDS of pro-democracy protesters thronged the streets of Hong Kong for a massive rally today as demonstrators look to carry the momentum of their movement into 2020.
Hong Kong has been battered by nearly seven months of unrest, which was sparked by a proposal to allow extraditions to mainland China but morphed into a larger revolt against what many fear is Beijing’s tightening control.
Demonstrators gathered in Victoria Park to march across Hong Kong’s main island, through the Causeway Bay district — usually packed with tourists and shoppers — to Central, the commercial heart of the international financial hub.
“It is sad that our demands from 2019 need to be carried forward to 2020,” Jimmy Sham of the Civil Human Rights Front, the umbrella group that organised the rally to put pressure on the city’s government to respond to protesters’ demands, said.
“We are expecting more repression to come. We have to actively prepare for the fight,” he told the gathered crowds before the march started.
Many people carried banners listing their main demands, including fully free elections in the city, an independent inquiry into the police handling of the protests, and amnesty for the nearly 6,500 people arrested during the movement, almost a third of whom are under the age of 20.
Along with huge peaceful rallies, the semi-autonomous city has also witnessed violent clashes, in which the police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets, while protesters have lobbed petrol bombs.
Activists have accused the police of brutality and rights violations, while city authorities — and the central government in Beijing — have accused pro-democracy protesters of rioting.
China has also alleged that the unrest has been fanned by foreign powers, and has bristled at criticism from rights groups and governments of the way the protests have been handled so far.
Organisers had received permission from Hong Kong authorities for the New Year’s Day march, but groups of police in riot gear were present near some parts of the planned route and an AFP reporter saw them stop and search a dozen people.
‘Hopeless situation’
Hong Kong saw in the new year with an evening of peaceful protests that descended into tear gas-choked clashes between hardcore demonstrators and the police overnight.
Thousands of people linked arms to form human chains that stretched for miles along busy shopping streets and neighbourhoods on New Year’s Eve. Later, protesters set fire to barricades in some parts of the city as the police launched 2020′s first volleys of tear gas and used water cannon to disperse the crowds.
The protest movement has become quieter since the city’s pro-democracy camp scored a landslide victory in a municipal-level vote in November — seen as a referendum on the Beijing-backed government — and violent clashes at some of the city’s university campuses.
But protesters have vowed to continue their fight for greater freedoms.
“Hong Kong’s rule of law, human rights, freedom have been eroded gradually,” a masked protester said in a speech at the rally today.
“Hong Kong people have been pushed to a hopeless situation. That’s why today we have to come out.”
The unrest that began in June last year is the biggest crisis the former British colony has faced since its return to Chinese rule in 1997.
Under the terms of that handover, Hong Kong enjoys unique freedoms unseen on the mainland, but fears have increased in recent years that they are being chipped away as Beijing exerts more control over the territory.
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You know it’s bad when you’re shocking the Dutch…
i love this city and i was a big advocate of it over the years, encouraging tourists to come visit. but unfortunately many parts of the city centre are no-go areas. I hate it. Apart from working close to the city centre, I avoid it at all other times.
Drug addicts rule the streets and the Gardai really don’t care. too much paperwork and time wasted for the culprits to walk out of court with a slap on the wrist and a sob story. I don’t blame the Gardai.
Will it change anytime over the next few years? No. There isn’t the political will to do so. the current lot have had 5 years to do something, but they literally havent done a thing about the open drug use in the city centre.
Unfortunately I have met many tourists who say they won’t come back to Dublin ever again. I don’t blame them. it wouldn’t be on my list of cities to visit.
I’m glad you don’t blame the Gardaí. There’s a couple of issues with the walking dead in the city centre. The first, and perhaps biggest, is that addiction is a social issue. Addiction is not cured by been arrested, or jailed. A lot of the druggies are local to the areas, so it’s only ever a case of moving them from one to street to the next. Likewise, addiction isnt a crime. A lot of the problems that addictions cause are a legal problem (theft/assaults/robbery etc). The second issue is that without the courts backing the work that Gardai do, then there really isn’t any point to Gardai getting stuck in. You’d actually have better success píssíng upwind, than you would of securing convictions that matter.
But I really think it’s the first issue that’s the most important. If Gardai go and arrest all of the walking dead on the boardwalks, and no one helps solve the social issues of drug abuse, then all we are doing is making more space for the next generation of druggies.
Gardai can enforce the law, but since when did the Irish legal system solve any real problem.
But it’s a sincere thank you for not jumping on the bandwagon and blaming Gardai. It’s easy for a lot of people to dial-a-cop and expect the world to right itself, even easier to complain when that approach doesn’t work for them.
There should really be much stronger policing in the city centre and reclaim it for the ordinary people.
The board walk is a S€um magnet. A national embarrassment
Those proposed injection centres could help alleviate a lot of those problems.
I work in the centre city and nothing like that would surprise me.. it’s like zombie land & Freak Central at times
hmm, so which are worst, the so-called “zombies” or the vampire bankers & politicians
The last time I had a family member visit me in Dublin, he had the privilege of witnessing a lovely young lady squatting in front of the Molly Malone statue (in its previous location). We thought she was taking a pi$$ until we got closer and realised it was a number 2.
I feel sorry for the poor Gardai who had to deal with her. But, yeah, not doing wonders for Dublin’s image.
^^^ lie
John, it’s very sad to see what’s going on there along the Liffey Boardwalk. One idea I could suggest is more CCTV coverage to discourage this anti social behaviour. Another would be to hold accountable the people in power who’s ‘winner takes all’ attitude gave our society the right to do as you please, so long as you don’t get caught! Bertie, bankers and developers etc. Fine example they provided, eh?
Sometimes them number 2s wait for no one!
I didn`t know Paula Radcliffe had visited Dublin….
Yep. I’ve seen a female drop her trackie bottoms and go to the toilet on the boardwalk in broad daylight. City centre is a cesspool
Could be because her feet never touched the ground, on account of all the drugs Radcliffe was using because of her bad health problems!
Along with the heroin users harassing people that a lie as well I suppose , that guy that followed me down the street roaring abuse was all dreamt up so .
Sorry there for a second I though Dublin city centre was the problem and the entire time it was , it was the joe soaps making up stories .
The last time I was in Amsterdam I witnessed a prostitute (clad in knickers & bra) chase after a “client” down along a canal whilst waving a large pink dildo at him, God knows what he did but it was very funny.
Forgot his large pink dildo, maybe.
Guerilla marketing, I’d say
Couldn’t have done much if she was still wearing her bra and knickers.
Didn’t the Gardai catch a couple doing the bold thing on the steps of a house in Dublin not so long ago, maybe it’s a new sort of dare game.
Cripes!
Yeah….that always happens in Amsterdam.
Christ almighty. If I wanted to hear what was happening on Joe Duffy’s show I’d listen to it. I come here to get away from that tripe.
You come here often enough to know what you’re going to get, go out for a walk if it’s annoying you!
‘Dutch tourist sees people having sex in broad daylight doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry so instead rings Joe Duffy to moan about it’. Kinda sums it up really.
I would go for a walk but I’m terrified i may see dogs copulating or some other major infraction that would leave me so traumatised I’d have to ring a national broadcaster about it. Then, the Journal would end up printing that story too and I’d have nowhere left to hide to get away from all this terrible news.
You do have to wonder what chain of events led a person not from these shores to call Joe.
Hardly ever in town any more and went in Saturday and couldn’t get over the amount of homeless (or maybe not I dunno) beggars there are now, it’s really gone up.
Junkies, homeless and Roma gypsies everywhere in Dublin. So embarrassing.
If they cleaned up the city then they wouldn’t need a nice shiny video to make it look good. Would speak for itself then.
The boardwalk is an ongoing problem area and no longer an amenity. Is it too much to ask for Gardai to patrol it at random a few times a day ?
Or a presence as well at the Luas ticket vending machines outside Heuston and Connolly stations ………
I don’t even know where to start with your comment.
1.) You have an under resourced and under staffed police, how do you explain to the robbery or burglar victim that there wasn’t a response because the limited Gardai that were available at any one time were busy with a crappy public order prisoner. Oh, and if you get that public order conviction it’ll be their 100th odd conviction.
2.) Lets say your plan results in every druggie been arrested. Let’s go even further and say by some miracle the Judges give all of them prison sentences. Where do you suppose they will all fit (we don’t have enough prisons), and the second part is do you think that by arresting and jailing them that addiction will just stop?
The problems we have with the druggies on the boardwalks is social. I’d be a Nobel prize winner if arresting people cured addiction and made everyone else stop using drugs.
It goes back to the issue of Gardai not been superheroes. You can chose from public order on the boardwalks, fraud, shoplifters, burglaries, robberies, assaults, traffic, dealing with victims, domestics, preserving scenes of crime, organised crime, racketeering, pick pockets, bike thefts, checking on bail conditions, sexual assaults, arson crimes, as well as dealing with issues of perception of crime (God knows everyone knows of the urban myth that Gardai are doing nothing about). Now, you can chose Gardai to do one of those things at a time. But not all of them.
What’s wrong with drunk/ drug tanks. A big cell and anyone found off their heads with drink or Drugs gets held until they sober up. Oh and a nice cage for beggars too
So we should stop all Garda patrols then ? Seems like that’s happening already.
It’s not a case of stopping all patrols. It’s a reality of 1000′s of calls to the 999 service daily in Dublin alone, numerous and resource intensive investigation files on the go, and often only tens of Gardai available at any one time in any one station (most non city centre stations would be doing well to have even that). It is simply not possible within the laws of physics to have the Gardaí respond to everything, as there’s usually dozens of calls at any one time. And there can be any number of investigations on the go. I also go back to my original point; you cannot police addiction. Get rid of addiction and substance abuse and you will bring about a cascade of positive changes. But simply having Gardaí arrest for been an addict doesn’t solve the issue.
Ideally, you want to have patrols and a police presence. That can be done, but at the moment with staffing levels as low as they are, and resources as tight as they are, that policing presence on the boardwalks will come at the cost of providing a policing presence somewhere else.
It’s easy to make an off the cuff comment ‘there should be more Gardaí’, but if you’re not prepared to go out there and back it up in reality with more Garda recruitment, more resources, changes to the law to make Gardaí more effective, then all your doing is making yourself sound like a popularist political sound bite.
A breath of fresh air, and a ride…..
Drug addicts, round them all up and leave them on Irelands Eye.
What about the wombats that live there at the moment.
We could hang them off Ireland eye maybe???
Aaah, the poor Dutch tourists, I live in Alkmaar, Netherlands and there are sections of public parks specifically earmarked for homosexual encounters. All very well and liberal, until one stumbles across it by accident, not a pretty sight, and there are other, non earmarked areas where it has become the norm. It’s not just a Dublin issue.
Like most people on Duffy’s show, they just like the sound of their own voices and have very little to say.
In fairness to them though, it’s not very often that a tourist just so happens to stumble into the middle of a park where that goes on. You wouldn’t see two people going at it in the middle of De Coolsingel or on the banks of the Damrak. Big difference to what goes on in relatively isolated parks and what’s going on right smack in the middle of a supposedly tourist-friendly city.
Strumpet City!
The Clap city
Ha ha you win today
That a boy Tony ha.
Kip of a Capital City. Filty.
Shocking the Dutch is saying something , in Amsterdam they have the red light and coffee shops all in the one area, maybe dublin needs to do like this , the Dutch police have zero tolerance on idiots the same needs to be done here…
Now I know where to go if I feel the need to do a bit of Dogging!!
Well that p1sses me off. I was on the boardwalk today and no one wanted to have sex with me, or film me having sex with someone else. Blatant ageism.
What do you expect when you have a city council hell bend on ensuring only cyclists can access the place?
All good and decent people drive their cars to Dundrum town centre.
All people drive to Dundrum town centre….I’d leave out the decent bit. Some of those people carrying yummy mummies would gouge your eyes out for a parking space, I’ve experienced it first hand.
Ok “decent” is a relative term.
You have good people, ok people, horrible people, rapists, murderers and then cyclists.
At least the yummy mummy’s are not cyclists.
They drive over them though
We’ve all had experiences with abusive yummy mummies on south-side suburbs.
Maybe this anecdote will cheer you up :-)
Going back a few years I saw one of said yummy mummies driving a humungus hummer into the Tesco carpark at Dundrum. It was so big she couldn’t fit it into any of the car spaces, so she literally had to turn around and leave.
She must have spent a fortune on the stupid oversized idiot-mobile and then couldn’t even use it to do the weekly shopping.
If there were more cyclists and less motorists then Dublin would be more like Amsterdam and the air would smell a lot cleaner too!
You mean FEWER motorists.
Yes, and of course only people who live within cycling distance should be allowed to access the capital city of this country.
Dublin is infested with cyclists who ride round provoking cab drivers so they can get put the resulting go-pro footage on the internet. Of course it’s always edited down so you can’t see the provocation.
Why should the people living in Dublin suburbs have to put up with the traffic from people living so far out? The paid less for their homes and pay lest property tax. Why should the people living closer have to subsidise others that cause the traffic problems?
Loads drive as far as me then park their cars all over the place when getting the train or bus.
You will realise how very stupid your comment is when you consider the amount of money in property tax, water rates etc. that the commercial businesses in the city pay. The very businesses trying to employ people who struggle to get in and out of the city every day. And the very businesses who rely on customers being able to get in and out of the city every day.
Cities are not just made up of residences.
@kal Because that’s what a city is. Without people travelling in to it every day from further afield there is no city.
Can we not advertise “Live Sex Shows – Amsterdam eat your heart out”??
On rarest occasions it’s funny but there is a sense of danger about the city we haven’t seen in quite some time, O’Connell street at night is somewhere I wouldn’t direct to anyone, walk down myself. Theres an atmosphere of violence about the place that puts debauchery into perspective.
full of zombies junkies down there shooting up all day long
That’s a bridge too far.
Jesus, that sort of crap goes on in every big capital city. Get over it
This isn’t a radio station.
Pics of GTFO
Ya know the way some people want a safe place for drug addicts to inject in the city centre. There should be a safe discreet place where couples can have sex in the city centre. That would be way better. After all there are sex addicts too.
If you haven’t had sex in public at least once, you’ve missed out on life. Lighten up.
The reason the junkies are in town is because they put all the needle exchange programme in city centre and not on the out skirts of the city pure Irish thing 2 do
and what about the junkie. …full of them around
Enough with the Dublin bashing!! God, The Journal really have it in for the city centre lately. This must be the 10th article in a week. Why do you all live here if you think its so rank?
I thought the Dutch would be used to that sort of thing. They should have offered them interesting to smoke after they were finished.
Ah, another Joe Duffy frustrated crank. 1 in a million chance pounced upon by some crank trying to justify her move to Amsterdam, then besmirch our country to her new found crusty buddies. Grrrrrrr
Honestly, a lot of us abroad do our best to talk up the country and convince people we meet or know abroad to travel to Ireland. I know myself that I’ve convinced a few people to make the journey over and they’ve thoroughly enjoyed the trip. I’d be absolutely mortified myself if any of the people I convinced to make the journey saw anything like that.
Temple Bar does be full of lads with black eyes from the U.K. these weekends… Is that the tourism we want alcoholics?
Afternoon delight!!
Dublin has a long history of earthiness; it’s just that the Catholic agenda dominated since about 1900. Some places are just returning to their historical roots. Temple Bar was originally Dublin port, famous for gambling, drinking, whoring. duelling and theatricals in the 18th century. Famous again for most of those. My Grandad told me he saw women street traders openly piss into basements by adjusting their skirts, so that’d be back in the 1900′s. He thought they were disgusting but admitted there were no public toilets they could use nearby. Recently I passed 3 addicts in a doorway down from The Ark in Temple Bar, openly injecting, at 3 in the afternoon.
I seen gardai tonight in which I bearly seen them before on the broadwalk since this was highlighted today
Dublin is a cesspool
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