US lawyer expelled from Hong Kong after being released from prison

Hong Kong, China, 24 Mar An American lawyer who was imprisoned for assaulting a policeman in Hong Kong has stated that he has been taken to the airport and deported from the city after being released from prison. Samuel Phillip Bickett, former director of anti-corruption compliance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said Wednesday in a statement published through the social network Twitter that he has been expelled from Hong Kong after completing his prison term. Bickett explained that Hong Kong immigration authorities rejected his request to “close his affairs and say goodbye to his loved ones” and that he was transported from Stanley Maximum Security Prison directly to a detention center, from which he was taken on Tuesday to a Washington-bound flight with a stopover in Turkey. “My arrest, trial, appeal, my two imprisonments and my deportation have made it clear that there is no longer a real concept of 'rights' in Hong Kong. The police are in charge at the request of Beijing,” Bickett told Efe. The thirty-year-old American was sentenced by a court of the former British colony to 4 and a half months in prison in July 2021 for assaulting Yu Shu-sang, a plainclothes policeman, during a brawl that broke out at a city subway station in December 2019. During that time, the Asian business center was still convulsed by a movement of anti-government protests that lasted for months in that year. The court was informed that Bickett stepped on the policeman's chest and hit him in the face, while Bickett's defense attorneys claimed that the American was trying to prevent Yu from attacking a young man who had skipped the lathe of the subway station. “Bickett didn't know Yu was a cop,” the defense alleged. During the protests, many young people jumped the winches at metro stations without paying a ticket in protest at the alleged favourable stance of the metro system operator towards the local government. The US citizen, who lived in the semi-autonomous region since 2014, insists that he was wrongfully convicted and that his imprisonment was “politically motivated”. After serving six weeks in August 2021, he was released pending an appeal that he lost in February of this year, so he had to return to prison to complete his sentence. Bickett also explained on his Twitter account that, upon his arrival in Istanbul, the Turkish authorities held him and his passport at the airport for eight hours. “The Turkish policemen who held me told me they were responding to a 'routine request' from the Hong Kong government,” Bickett told Efe. The Hong Kong Department of Immigration had not responded to questions from Efe at the time of publication of this news item. At the beginning of last March, the British Paul Harris, a prominent human rights lawyer and former director of the Hong Kong Bar Association, left the territory hours after stating that he had been summoned for a meeting with the new police unit in charge of implementing the recent National Security Act of Hong Kong. This law, created in 2020, provides for sentences of up to life imprisonment for cases such as secession or collusion with foreign forces.