It only took twelve years, several seismic shifts in the global political order, and enough legal ink to fill a second harbor, but the Hong Kong Coroner’s Court has finally—with the agonizing, glacial urgency of a tectonic plate—determined that thirty-nine people who died in a 2012 ferry collision were, in fact, ‘unlawfully killed.’ This is the kind of profound judicial revelation that makes one wonder if the robe-wearing elite are actually operating on a different temporal plane where ‘immediately’ means ‘whenever the heat death of the universe begins to set in.’ To the uninitiated, the 2012 Lamma IV disaster was a tragedy; to the legal system, it was a twelve-course meal of billable hours and administrative hand-wringing that has only just reached the dessert phase.

Let us marvel at the efficiency. In the time it took for a court to confirm that a high-speed collision between two vessels resulting in nearly forty deaths wasn't just a very wet misunderstanding, we have seen the rise and fall of tech empires, the invention of several new ways to ruin the internet, and a global pandemic that made us all wish we were at the bottom of the ocean. The Coroner’s Court, in its infinite wisdom, previously decided back in 2020 that an inquiry wasn't even necessary. Why bother looking at the wreckage when the government had already marked its own homework in 2013? It takes a special kind of bureaucratic arrogance to suggest that a government-led hearing is the final word on government-led incompetence, but that is the beautiful, circular logic of the modern state. If the people in charge say they’ve investigated themselves and found nothing but a few ‘procedural hiccups,’ who are the grieving families to demand anything as vulgar as a public accounting?

The word ‘unlawfully’ does a staggering amount of heavy lifting in this ruling. It suggests that there is, somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of maritime law, a ‘lawful’ way to be pulverized by a ferry—perhaps one involving the correct permits, a properly stamped exit visa from the mortal coil, and a polite tip to the captain as the water fills your lungs. The reality is that this ruling is the final, pathetic wheeze of a system that prides itself on ‘order’ and ‘rule of law’ while the actual mechanisms of safety and accountability are as porous as the hull of a sinking junk. We are told this is ‘closure.’ Closure is a term invented by grief counselors and politicians to describe the moment when the public finally stops asking inconvenient questions and the lawyers finally run out of ways to say ‘it’s complicated.’

Deeply analyze the motives here, and you’ll find nothing but a desperate desire to file a folder away. The court didn't suddenly find a moral compass; it simply ran out of excuses to keep the folder open. The coroner’s conclusion—returned on Wednesday—is the same one reached years ago, yet it was delayed by a system that treats human life as a data point in a long-term actuarial study. It is a performance of justice, a theatrical display of concern that arrives precisely when it can no longer affect anything. The captains were already jailed, the government departments already ‘restructured’ (the bureaucratic equivalent of moving a bowl of rotting fruit from the table to the counter), and the public’s attention has long since moved on to the next shiny catastrophe.

This is the state of our species: we have the technology to map the seafloor in high definition, yet we lack the basic human competence to keep two boats from hitting each other in broad daylight. And once the inevitable happens, we spend over a decade arguing about whether the resulting corpses were ‘unlawfully’ created. The Left will cry for more regulations—more paperwork for the pile—while the Right will grumble about the cost of the inquest and the ‘unnecessary’ burden on the shipping industry. Both are missing the point with spectacular precision. The point is that the system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as intended. It is designed to delay, to obfuscate, and to eventually deliver a verdict so obvious it borders on insult, long after the passion for reform has been smothered by the sheer weight of time.

Thirty-nine people died. They died because of a systemic failure that prioritized speed and convenience over the basic physics of maritime safety. And now, twelve years later, a man in a wig has officially noted that this was ‘unlawful.’ Bravo. I’m sure the families, after a decade of living in a legal purgatory, are absolutely thrilled to have this piece of paper to press against the void where their loved ones used to be. It is a testament to the enduring stupidity of our institutions that we celebrate this as a ‘ruling’ rather than an admission of twelve years of collective failure. Sleep well, Hong Kong; your courts are on the case, and they’ll have more obvious truths for you by the mid-2030s.