British and Overseas Judges: Hong Kong

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I, too, would like to express my appreciation to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for securing this important debate and for succeeding in his purposes before he even stood up to speak. I know that that success comes from considerable time spent campaigning on this and many other issues relating to human rights in Hong Kong and the concerning, deteriorating situation there. For that, I commend him and others in this Chamber, and of course I join them in welcoming the Government’s statement today.

I will make just a few comments. The UK legal community remains one of the most highly respected in the world. I am proud to declare an interest as a solicitor still on the roll. Nearly one third of the world’s population today lives in an English common-law jurisdiction or a jurisdiction with common-law features, and the fact that citizens from all over the world travel to our country to receive justice is a reflection of our leadership when it comes to protection of the rule of law. That is why today’s announcement of the Government’s decision is so important, because we have to retain that consistency in order to retain the respect that we have worldwide for our system of justice.

I see this day after day in my role as the Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief. I work on cases from around the world, so I know that for many of us it has been particularly—my notes say “difficult”, but I would say that it has been distressing to look on at the deteriorating human rights situation in Hong Kong over what has actually been a very few years. The speed and alacrity of that deterioration has indeed been distressing—the dismantling of rights previously protected under Hong Kong’s basic law and of not only the “one country, two systems” model, but the English common-law system.

I have curtailed most of my speech, but I will take this opportunity briefly to put on record some specific concerns and examples of why today’s decision is so important. There have been attempts to intimidate the Hong Kong legal community, such as the shameful targeting of the former head of the Hong Kong Bar Association, Paul Harris SC, who was forced to flee the city after being questioned under the national security law last month. We saw judges who offered what were perceived as lenient sentences targeted by the pro-Beijing media, as was the case with district judge Sham Siu-man, who also had to flee the city in October 2021 after being attacked by the pro-Beijing publication Wen Wei Po. Like others, I am a patron of Hong Kong Watch, a UK-based non-governmental organisation, which has been targeted even more recently under the national security law.

I recognise that some in the UK legal community endeavoured to make the case that our foreign judges could be a moderating influence on the Hong Kong Government while they remained, and could serve as a ballast against extreme sentencing and further deterioration of human rights. I am glad that the Government have wholly rejected that view today, because that moderating influence has been in severely short supply. Hong Kong Watch reports that in the past two years there were over 720 political prisoners in Hong Kong, and over 10,000 protesters have been arrested since 2019. Student activist Tony Chung received three and a half years in jail for social media posts advocating independence, and Tong Ying-kit was given six and a half years of his national security sentence for waving a flag with the protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times”.

Clearly, we could not allow the Hong Kong Government to continue to use the credentials and credibility of UK judges and their counterparts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand—although this is obviously an issue that those counterparts will have to look at themselves—as a smokescreen to hide their attacks on the rule of law, democracy and basic human rights. Today, I am delighted that the Government have stood on the side of the oppressed, not with the oppressor, and withdrawn our judges from Hong Kong.