How China’s new national security law subverts Hong Kong’s rule of law

With China becoming a political hegemon as well as an economic powerhouse, its leaders feel able to unilaterally declare the joint declaration obsolete, bar British critics from entering Hong Kong

Tensions are running high in Hong Kong at a decision by China’s ruling body, the National People’s Congress (NPC), authorising its standing committee to draft a national security law for Hong Kong. The decision, drafted in secret, is likely to become law by August.

It should never have come to this. Article 18 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law – the territory’s de facto mini-constitution that came into effect after the British handover in 1997 – specifically limited Beijing from applying national laws to the territory, except in matters of defence and foreign affairs. The NPC decision changes all that. It not only authorises the standing committee to draft such a law, it allows the law to be inserted into Hong Kong’s Basic Law by promulgation.

This completely by-passes the Legislative Council, the law-making body of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government, and creates new national security crimes. It talks, for example, of “unflinchingly” preventing, stopping and punishing any conduct that seriously endangers national security, such as separatism, subversion of state power, or organising and carrying out terrorist activities. Any activities by foreign and overseas forces that interfere “in any fashion” in the affairs of Hong Kong, and any overseas forces that use Hong Kong to carry out “separatist, subversive, infiltrative or destructive activities”, will be punished…