Hong Kong’s government has released the draft text of a new national security law that would further tighten control on the city and bring its laws closer in line with mainland China.
The law, known as Article 23, is a domestic piece of legislation defining and penalising crimes related to national security.
The draft published on Friday proposes sentences of up to life in prison for some crimes including insurrection and treason, and lengthens allowable periods of detention without charge from 48 hours to two weeks.
Possessing a seditious publication could attract up to three years in jail under the proposed law, which also gives police the right to search any premises to seize and destroy such material.
The draft also introduces a crime of “foreign interference”, and of colluding with foreign forces. The sentence for sedition – already outlawed under colonial-era laws – increases from two years to seven, and then to 10 if found to have been committed in collusion with foreign forces.
In other offences, such as revealing state secrets, limited public interest defences have been allowed and the bill notes Hong Kong’s traditional freedoms. Police must also petition a magistrate if they want to hold someone without charge for longer than the current limit of 48 hours.
Debate on the law began on Friday morning, soon after the draft’s publication, and it is expected to pass quickly through the parliament, which has next to no opposition. The security secretary, Chris Tang, said the law was needed to “plug loopholes” in Hong Kong’s national security system. Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee, has called for the law to be processed “at full speed”.
The law’s development was stipulated in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution at the time of the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule, but a previous attempt in 2003 to introduce it failed in the face of community pushback. The delay was cited as justification for the Chinese central government imposing the National Security Law (NSL) on Hong Kong in 2021.
The proposed law is similar in scope and detail to the NSL, but the NSL will remain, and take precedence over Article 23.
On 19 February a cohort of more than 80 legal groups published an open letter saying the new law would “dramatically undermine the Hong Kong people’s due process and fair trial rights”.
Business people and journalists have also expressed fear that a broadly framed law could criminalise their day-to-day work, especially with the proposed definition of state secrets concerning those linked to economic, social and technological developments.
The government has rejected such concerns. In January, Lee said the law was in response to “foreign agents and Hong Kong independence advocates … still lurking in our society”, after the 2019 pro-democracy protests and the subsequent government crackdown on opposition. Scores of pro-democracy activists and politicians have been jailed, and the legal and political system has been overhauled.
The proposed law had been open to the public for a short one-month consultation period, which the government said attracted more than 98% positive feedback, less than 1% negative, and a handful of objections it dismissed as coming from “overseas anti-China organisations” or fugitives.
Concerns raised by the UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, were last month rejected as “maliciously smearing and attacking Hong Kong’s human rights, freedoms and rule of law”.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
