Purporting to plug loopholes that expose Hong Kong to treason, insurrection, espionage, sabotage and external interference, Article 23 entered Hong Kong law on March 23, 2024 amid a totalitarian pantomime of governance. The last time such an attempt was made, in the days when protest was still possible, it was contested by 500,000 people.
Among other impositions, it will require citizens to have valid excuses for keeping old pro-democracy newspapers at home, potentially criminalize communicating with overseas human rights organizations and compel Hong Kongers to report one another, on pain of 14 years in prison, if they suspect that treason is or might be committed. The idea is to create a culture of fear in which people feel personally imperiled if they do not inform authorities when their peers criticize the state.
With the result reportedly announced on Chinese state television almost 20 minutes before the “vote” had begun, the bill was passed, despite its obvious flaws and deep concern about its economic impact, by every single one of the 89 lawmakers in Hong Kong’s opposition-free legislative council, including the speaker, who generally abstains.
These lawmakers, some of whom were wearing purple, the “theme color” for the legislation, according to China’s Global Times, then posed for a group photo to celebrate their own rubber-stamp decision. Elementary school children had been invited into the council chamber to witness the moment, which was described as “historic” by Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu (李家超).
This latter may well be accurate, but for all the wrong reasons: In the words of Amnesty International, Article 23 can transform “pretty much anything” into a state secret if Lee himself says it is and then imprison anybody for imparting it. Within the broad scope of the law, Lee can also make up subsidiary legislation that takes immediate effect. Transgressing it will land offenders behind bars for seven years.
Six independent experts for the United Nations have formally expressed the opinion that the ordnance “includes numerous measures that would significantly and unduly limit the exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms and would be incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).”
They were joined in their condemnation by the representatives of several countries. The U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron asserted that Article 23 “will further damage the rights and freedoms enjoyed in the city” and undermine “Hong Kong’s implementation of binding international obligations including the Sino-British Joint Declaration.”
The European Union expressed dismay, too. “The bill’s sweeping provisions and broad definitions, specifically in relation to foreign interference and state secrets, appear as particular concerns. The significantly increased penalties provided for in the bill, its extraterritorial reach and its — at least partial — retroactive applicability are also deeply worrying,” it said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meanwhile promised solidarity with those who are democracy-minded both inside and outside Hong Kong. Tweeting on X, he affirmed, “We are firmly committed to defending human rights worldwide and continue to stand with our international partners and people in Hong Kong.”
The U.S. was put under immediate pressure to go beyond social media platitudes by the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), an overseas advocacy group for the rights of Hong Kongers, which called upon U.S. President Joe Biden to apply Magnitsky-style sanctions on those officials from both China and Hong Kong who are pulling the rug from Hong Kong’s autonomy and to pass the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office Certification Act. It would “revoke the legal and diplomatic privileges the [Hong Kong] government outposts utilize to lobby on Beijing’s behalf.”
While calling for Hong Kong’s membership in multilateral bodies like the World Trade Organization also to be revoked on the grounds that the city is little different to mainland China now, HKDC also drew attention to the defective public consultation procedure that prefaced passage of Article 23.
Although the Hong Kong government claims that 98.6% of the more than 13,000 comments it received to the bill in just one month were positive, this was perhaps because any that were negative stood at risk of falling afoul of the law itself. Attempts by the BBC to poll opinion on the streets indicated a citizenry living in fear, while HKDC reported that its input was followed by the threatening accusation from authorities that it and other groups were “anti-China.”
One major anxiety with the new law is the power conferred on police, who can now hold people for 16 days without charge and prohibit contact with lawyers for 48 hours. Combined with the very real likelihood that reporting abuse to international bodies and rights organizations will be interpreted as “external interference,” this essentially gives authorities a free hand to pressure and even torture arrestees.
Anybody who thinks that Hong Kong is beyond such low-beneath-lows has not been following the trial of pro-democracy businessperson and former owner of the Apple Daily newspaper, Jimmy Lai (黎智英). There, in order to hold together a spectacularly underwhelming assortment of contrivances as if it were a chain of evidence, prosecutors have brought forward a witness named Andy Li (李宇軒), who is believed to have been tortured in a Chinese prison prior to providing testimony.
Joining Li on the stand are several former employees of Apple Daily who are under the duress of possible life sentences themselves if they do not conform to the prosecutorial line. Their combined statements fumble towards an illustration of Lai as a ruthless supervillain who leveraged contacts with — God forbid! — foreigners to foment public dissatisfaction and international sanctions against the Hong Kong and Chinese leadership through the megaphone of domestic and overseas media. What the evidence in fact describes, however, is the entirely normal communications and operations of a successful news outlet headed by a man with mundanely reasonable opinions.
Hong Kong can expect more trials of such a nature now that Article 23 is in place. Within days of coming into effect, it had already contributed to the departure of the rights-focused media Radio Free Asia from the city and been used to block the release of Ma Chun-man (馬俊文), an activist affectionately referred to as “Captain America 2.0” for the props he used to take to pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019. Ma was detained in 2020 and convicted under the infamous National Security Law in 2021 of “inciting secession” for persistently chanting slogans and displaying placards that advocate independence for Hong Kong. He would have been eligible for release after serving two-thirds of the five-year term for his supposed crime on March 25, 2024.
Ma was noteworthy for his defiance during trial and even wrote a letter to the pre-selected judge expressing, “On my road to democracy and freedom, I cannot afford to be a coward.” This spirit was matched even in the petrified atmosphere of the present day, when on March 16, twelve Hong Kongers, including the actor Gregory Wong Chung-yiu (王宗堯), were ordered to prison for periods of up to seven years in response to their storming of the legislature during 2019 protests. As reported by The Guardian, in the days prior to sentencing, one defendant Althea Suen Hiu-nam (孫曉嵐) stated, “The actual crime committed by the protesters … is the pursuit of democracy, freedom of thought and free will,” while another Owen Chow Ka-shing (鄒家成) bluntly reminded the court that “riot is the language of the unheard.”
In an ever-more isolated Hong Kong, recently crowned as the least happy developed society in the world, which sends a pro-Beijing lawmaker to masquerade as the voice civil society at the United Nations, forces pro-democracy political parties to close and places a transgender activist at severe risk of mistreatment in the Chinese justice system, their words will have particular resonance.
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