Hong Kong security chief calls for more laws for new offenses Beijing hasn’t yet banned

蘋果日報 2021/06/22 06:15


Hong Kong “never stopped” studying legislative measures to fulfill the Basic Law requirement of safeguarding national security, said the city’s security minister, adding that new legislation would be needed for areas not covered by last year’s Beijing-imposed law.
Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law — the mini-constitution that was supposed to guarantee freedoms and liberties after its handover to Chinese rule — specifies seven types of national security offenses that must be legislated against. The national security law passed by the National People’s Congress last year and imposed on Hong Kong covers only four types.
Last year’s law does not fully cover the scope of the offenses specified in Article 23, and those areas would definitely be legislated for, Secretary for Security John Lee said in an interview with Sing Tao. It was also necessary, Lee said, to study whether the scope of the offenses already covered needed to be strengthened.
Lee added that the work involved is complicated, and it’s hard to see it being completed within this legislative year.
Lee said that the work involves taking reference from the implementation of the existing national security law and ongoing court cases. Since Article 23 legislation will be based on common law, Lee added, there was a need to study overseas examples as well.
The legal research also required the government to look at existing laws, such as the Societies Ordinance and the Crimes Ordinance, and study whether existing offenses needed to be amended, Lee said.
The Crimes Ordinance already includes an offense of treason, but it has not been updated since Hong Kong’s colonial era. The Societies Ordinance also includes provisions allowing the government to outlaw organized groups on national security grounds, which were deployed in 2018 to ban the operation of the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party.
The prospect of Article 23 legislation in 2003 prompted an estimated 500,000 Hong Kongers to take to the streets in protest that year. The legislation was later withdrawn, and a national security law passed last year bypassed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and was instead enacted by the National People’s Congress in Beijing.
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