Hong Kong: Nationwide Protection Law has established a human legal rights crisis
Hong Kong’s Nationwide Security Legislation (NSL) has decimated the city’s freedoms and developed a landscape progressively devoid of human rights protections, Amnesty International reported in a new research briefing launched now, just a person yr following the Beijing-imposed laws took influence.
‘In the Title of Countrywide Security’ facts how the regulation enacted on 30 June 2020 has provided the authorities free of charge rein to illegitimately criminalize dissent when stripping away the rights of those it targets.
“In a single 12 months, the National Protection Legislation has place Hong Kong on a rapid path to turning out to be a law enforcement state and established a human rights emergency for the folks residing there,” explained Yamini Mishra, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Regional Director.
“From politics to tradition, instruction to media, the regulation has contaminated every single aspect of Hong Kong culture and fomented a local weather of worry that forces residents to assume two times about what they say, what they tweet and how they dwell their lives.
“Ultimately, this sweeping and repressive legislation threatens to make the town a human legal rights wasteland progressively resembling mainland China.”



The Hong Kong authorities need to stop working with its excessively wide definition of ‘endangering national security’ for the blanket restriction of freedoms.






Centered on evaluation of court docket judgments, court listening to notes and interviews with activists qualified less than the NSL, Amnesty’s briefing demonstrates how the laws has been applied to have out a wide assortment of human legal rights violations more than the previous 12 months.
In this time, the authorities has repeatedly used “national security” as a pretext to justify censorship, harassment, arrests and prosecutions. There is distinct proof indicating that the so-identified as human rights safeguards established out in the NSL are efficiently useless, when the protections existing in regular Hong Kong legislation are also trumped by it.
Bail reversal violates right to good trail
On 1 July 2020, the very first entire day of the regulation becoming in pressure, police arrested more than 300 protesters, which includes 10 on suspicion of violating the NSL. Because then, the government has ongoing to arrest and demand people today under the NSL entirely mainly because they have exercised their legal rights to liberty of expression, peaceful assembly and association.
Worse even now, men and women billed under the regulation are successfully presumed guilty fairly than harmless, indicating they are denied bail except if they can demonstrate they will not “continue to commit acts endangering nationwide security”.
The briefing also outlines how authorities have utilized the NSL to:
- Crack down on international political advocacy, arresting or purchasing the arrest of 12 persons for “colluding” or “conspiracy to collude” with “foreign forces” simply because they were being in speak to with foreign diplomats, called for sanctions from other nations or called for other international locations to offer asylum for these fleeing from persecution. Other individuals have been specific for their social media posts or for giving interviews to foreign media.
- Develop powers for law enforcement investigators – such as supplying the Hong Kong Police’s nationwide protection unit the capability to research homes, freeze or confiscate belongings and seize journalistic resources, these kinds of as in the two raids on pro-democracy newspaper Apple Day-to-day throughout the calendar year. Such unchecked powers go away little space to stop opportunity human rights violations throughout the investigative process.
“The Hong Kong governing administration need to stop applying its excessively wide definition of ‘endangering nationwide security’ for the blanket restriction of freedoms. As a start, it will have to drop all felony expenses in opposition to all those at this time going through prosecution for performing exercises their human legal rights,” reported Yamini Mishra.
“The onus is also on the United Nations to begin an urgent debate on the deteriorating human rights condition in China, like with regards to the implementation of the NSL in Hong Kong.”
Track record
The NSL was unanimously passed by China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee and enacted in Hong Kong on 30 June 2020 devoid of any official, meaningful community or other nearby consultation.
The law targets alleged acts of “secession”, “subversion of state power”, “terrorist activities” and “collusion with foreign or exterior forces to endanger national security”.
This sweeping definition of “national security”, which follows that of the Chinese central authorities, lacks clarity and authorized predictability and has been employed arbitrarily as a pretext to restrict the human legal rights to flexibility of expression, peaceful assembly, affiliation and liberty, as properly as to repress dissent and political opposition.
The NSL’s arbitrary software and imprecise criminal definitions properly make it unattainable to know how and when it might be considered as violated, resulting in an instantaneous chilling impact throughout Hong Kong from day just one.
In between 1 July 2020 and 23 June 2021, police arrested or requested the arrest of at minimum 118 people in relation to the NSL. As of 23 June 2021, 64 people have been formally billed, of whom 47 are presently in pretrial detention.
