Mainland Chinese personnel operating in Hong Kong under a new national security law should be accountable to the government and courts of the city, says Philip Dykes, the chair of the Hong Kong Bar Association.

Dykes’ comments add to rising worries voiced by the legal sector in the weeks since the Chinese legislature passed a resolution in late May to impose national security law in Hong Kong.

Some of the worries center on how mainland officials will operate in the city, where, according to a Xinhua News Agency statement on Saturday, mainland authorities will establish a dedicated national security office empowered to exert jurisdiction under specified circumstances in “very few” cases about threats to national security.

Dykes, a human rights lawyer, said in an interview with Apple Daily that mainland personnel enforcing the new law in the public eye should be held accountable to the local government and courts. This was to conform to the common law principle that everyone should be subject to the same restrictions, he said.

Dykes expressed worries that the new law might contain provisions to exempt such officials from legal responsibilities, given Xinhua’s revelation that the legislation would override existing local laws should conflicts arise. He said the move would be detrimental to the independent legal system of Hong Kong, which was protected in theory by the city’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

The prevailing nature of the new law could also have undesirable effects on human rights, considering discrepancies between the legal systems in Hong Kong and mainland China, he said. Hence, human rights provisions must be stipulated in the new law, he added.

One aspect that has drawn particular attention from the legal sector is Beijing’s intention to grant Hong Kong’s chief executive the power to appoint judges to hear national security cases. On Tuesday, former chief justice Andrew Li and Dykes’ Bar Association both issued statements expressing concerns over the impact of such a provision on the semi-autonomous city’s judicial independence.

Dykes said that if the cases involved sensitive national information, special procedures could be put in place to ensure confidentiality. It was not necessary to appoint a separate list of judges to preside over those cases, he said.

“You are picking your judges because you may have influence on the outcome of the case and that’s awful,” he said.

Dykes also hoped the clauses on “collusion with foreign powers” would be made clearer. He said that under the common law system, there was no “collusion” but only “conspiracy” to commit a crime. The definition of collusion in the law must not be “open-ended,” he cautioned.

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