Hong Kong passes new security law to quash dissent

Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing Legislative Council took 11 days to unanimously pass a new ‘Safeguarding National Security Ordinance’ security law on March 19th, 2024, which will come into effect on March 23rd. While local authorities argue its necessity for national stability, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as Australia, the UK, the US, and many EU states have publicly expressed their concerns, alongside human rights-focused NGOs like Amnesty International. The new law increases police powers, reduces due process rights and criminalizes peaceful assembly and activism, broadly covering: “treason, insurrection and sedition, theft of state secrets and espionage, sabotage and foreign interference”. The new legislation is vague in its definition of offenses. For example, it introduces possible 20-year prison sentences upon “acts endangering national security in relation to computers or electronic systems”, but does not define these acts. Such lack of legal clarity leaves laws open to interpretation and abuse. 

Under this new law, acts under the name of treason, insurrection and sabotage are punishable by life imprisonment and national security suspects can now be detained for 14 days without being formally charged, whereas previously, it was only 48 hours. In 2003, attempts to pass similar versions of this law led to street protests, with over 500,000 people marching and resulting in a retraction of the legislation. 

With such ambiguous definitions of crimes, there is a significant risk of politically motivated prosecutions and convictions. Such vague laws, with heavy fining and sentencing possibilities, have strong impacts on freedom of expression ranging from individual to organizational levels. Impacts of the approved new legislation on restricting freedoms of expression can already be observed. For example, US-funded news outlet Radio Free Asia was reported to withdraw from Hong Kong by the end of March, having been accused of being “anti-China” by local pro-Beijing newspapers. 

The erosion of civil liberties has been ongoing upon the imposition of the National Security Law in June 2020, in response to vast public unrest and a series of demonstrations in 2019. The National Security Law disassembled Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, shutting down pro-democracy and anti-Beijing newspapers, detaining and prosecuting peaceful protesters and more. 

While China agreed to give Hong Kong fifty years of autonomy upon its handover by Britain in 1997 and to maintain a ‘One Country, Two Systems’ form of governance. As Hong Kong nears the end of its agreed autonomous period, it is clear China is breaking its international commitments to quash public dissent and what it sees as a challenge to Beijing’s authority.