Human Rights in Hong Kong

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I thank you, Mr Twigg, and the Minister for understanding that I will have to leave early to attend a Holocaust Memorial Day event in Parliament. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, and I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for securing the debate and for the way in which he opened it. I also want to put on record my appreciation of Hong Kong Watch, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation of Journalists and all those who do so much to defend human rights and democracy in Hong Kong under enormous pressure.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that today’s debate has united Members on both sides of the House in support of the people of Hong Kong, their democratic institutions and their fundamental human rights. They have enjoyed these human rights for years: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, the freedom to travel, the freedom of association and, as we have just heard from the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce)—and, indeed, as we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—freedom of religion or belief.

Everyone who has spoken has noted how the 1984 Sino-British declaration promised the people of Hong Kong that they would

“enjoy a high degree of autonomy”

for 50 years after the handover to China. They were also told that their lifestyle, rights and freedoms—everything they enjoyed—would remain intact and unchanged for half a century after 1997. We are little more than halfway through the 50 years that were guaranteed, but those basic freedoms and those human rights that they were assured of have become a distant memory. Lord Patten’s famously optimistic line was:

“Now, Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong.”

Sadly, that could not be further from the truth.

Although we recognise that 1997 was an important step in global decolonisation, we deeply regret that, contrary to what was promised to the people of Hong Kong in a legally binding international agreement, the Chinese Communist party has completely reneged on its end of the deal. The steady erosion of personal and political freedoms has now become a full-on assault, as the Beijing Government, through the passage of the insidious national security law, embarks on a draconian programme of assimilation and integration of Hong Kong into the Chinese mainstream. As the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham said, that completely dismantles, once and for all, the notion of there being one country, two systems.

We have heard that national security laws were passed in June 2020 in response to huge pro-democracy protests. That crackdown has led to a mass exodus of people. Although those laws are specifically designed to criminalise secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign organisations, they have effectively stripped away freedom of expression and peaceful protest, and extinguished Hong Kong’s independent free press, turning Hong Kong, in just four years, from being one of the most open cities in Asia to one of the most repressive.

Those national security laws are designed to create doubt and ambiguity in the minds of the people as to whether what they are doing—indeed, what they have always done—could now be considered a criminal act. The only people who know what the law actually means are the people who make it, and there is a deliberate fug of ambiguity and confusion about what actually constitutes an offence that would endanger national security. That fug of ambiguity has had the desired effect because, as we have heard today, dozens of civil society organisations and trade unions, as well as the independent press, disbanded and shut down, for fear of falling foul of a law that they simply do not understand.

Every speaker today has talked about the most high-profile victim of these national security laws, Jimmy Lai. The 76-year-old UK national is a citizen standing trial on three charges under these laws and faces a further charge of conspiracy to publish seditious literature. Since his arrest in 2020, Mr Lai, a strident and fearless pro-democracy activist, has been held in solitary confinement and has now spent more than 1,200 days in prison. This political show trial of a long-time critic of the Chinese Communist party started early last month, and he faces life imprisonment. We must prepare ourselves, because it is a question of when, not if, he is found guilty. That is because, not surprisingly, there is a 100% conviction rate under the national security laws. I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), who is no longer in his place, for raising the issue of former UK judges giving legitimacy to such a repressive regime and a system that has no legitimacy.

Amnesty International’s deputy regional director, Sarah Brooks, has said:

“Jimmy Lai is the most high-profile public figure prosecuted under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, and the world will be watching.”

She added:

“The prosecution of Jimmy Lai shows how Hong Kong’s repressive National Security Law is being used to stifle press freedom and crush civil society.”

She is right that the world will be watching.

The International Federation of Journalists has said that the use of these laws

“and archaic sedition legislation to silence critical and independent voices in Hong Kong must cease”,

and has called for all such charges to be dropped.

Even the United Nations has expressed deep concern about what it sees as an inextricable link between Jimmy Lai’s outspoken, pro-democracy criticism of the Chinese Government and his arrest and the show trial. It is clear that Beijing and Hong Kong are orchestrating an assault on the free press and freedom of expression. Jimmy Lai’s trial epitomises that rapid decline in the rule of law in Hong Kong.

In 2022, I described in this Chamber the situation in Hong Kong as grim. Sadly, it is even more grim today and there is little prospect of it getting better any time soon. In that debate two years ago, I and every other speaker raised the issue of the Magnitsky sanctions, asking the Government why, despite the flagrant breach of human rights law, no senior Hong Kong official had been sanctioned. That question is relevant today and I ask it again. What is the point of having the ability to sanction those who flout international law if we are not prepared to use it? If the ripping up of an international treaty, a crackdown on the free press, a curtailment of civil liberties, a full-on attack on democracy and the imprisonment and potential jailing for life of a UK national cannot bring the Government to use Magnitsky-style sanctions, the question must be: what would it take?