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Bloomberg
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is consulting with the UK’s most senior legal officer on the position of British judges in Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, as he condemned China’s “chilling†national security law for suppressing legal freedoms in the former British colony.
Hong Kong’s independent judiciary is a key to its success as a global financial hub, and its constitution, known as the Basic Law, states that judges may come from other common law jurisdictions.
Senior judges from the UK, Australia and New Zealand occasionally hear cases in Hong Kong based on their expertise on points of public and constitutional importance.
But Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has argued there is no separation of legal and political powers under the Basic Law, and international observers have expressed concern about the future impartiality of the court under China’s new national security law and other efforts to quell dissent.
By considering the status
of Britain’s judges, Raab is using another tool to protest the implementation by China
of national security laws
that criminalise a broad range of acts, such as sedition,
secession, foreign collusion and terrorism.