Foreign judges are fed up with Hong Kong’s political environment

IT IS AN unusual arrangement, to be sure. Since its establishment in 1997, the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong has had both local and foreign judges on its bench. The set-up was part of the deal that handed the territory from Britain to China that year. The foreigners, who hold non-permanent seats, tend to have impressive legal backgrounds and come from other common-law jurisdictions, such as Britain, Australia and Canada. So they are accustomed to exercising judicial power “independently and free from any interference”, as laid out in the territory’s mini-constitution, called the Basic Law.