LONDON, May 15, 2025 – The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation deplores the introduction of subsidiary legislation under Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO), known as Article 23, that clarifies in Hong Kong’s domestic laws how Beijing would take over jurisdiction of national security cases.
The new laws provide for the Beijing-controlled Office for Safeguarding National Security (OSNS), set up in 2020 to oversee the crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, to extradite certain national security cases and defendants to mainland China for processing by courts controlled by the Communist Party of China (CCP), where the conviction rate is 99 percent.
They were gazetted on May 13 using a negative vetting procedure that means the Legislative Council (LegCo) can only scrutinise them after they have been implemented. While Article 55 of the Beijing-imposed 2020 National Security Law already allows Beijing to take control of national security cases, the updates to Article 23 detail the procedure in Hong Kong’s law and specify new consequences for those who obstruct or disclose OSNS operations.
For example, the laws include provisions that make it an offence punishable by up to seven years in prison and fines of up to HK$500,000 to disclose information about cases being handled by the OSNS. They also designate as “prohibited places” six OSNS sites, including four hotels being used to temporarily accommodate the massive influx of national security police that arrived in Hong Kong after the NSL was imposed in 2020. On May 14, journalists attempting to take photos of two of the prohibited places were stopped by police and forced to delete their footage.
The new legislation was introduced at the same time as China’s State Council released a White Paper entitled “China’s National Security in the New Age,” indicating that Hong Kong and China are increasingly one, indivisible national security ecosystem. The Hong Kong government cited the “increasingly turbulent global geopolitical landscape” and national security risks as their reasoning for this tightening of the national security apparatus in Hong Kong, but it is everyday Hong Kongers, not foreign spies, who live in fear of constant and unchallengeable OSNS surveillance.
Mark Sabah, UK Director at the CFHK Foundation, said:
“The threat of extradition to mainland China was the trigger for the 2019 protests that brought millions onto the streets in Hong Kong and resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of political prisoners. With the implementation of these new laws, the authorities are reminding Hong Kongers that Beijing is always watching them and that they could be ‘disappeared’ into China’s opaque legal system, where even the basic legal protections remaining in Hong Kong simply do not exist.
“There is no longer any shadow of a doubt that “one country, two systems” is dead in the water. The independence of Hong Kong’s courts made the city a great and thriving financial hub. Now, who knows when Beijing might swoop in to take control of a legal case on national security grounds, further undermining business confidence — could business disputes like the one involving CK Hutchison over control of Panama’s ports now be transferred to China because it is deemed important to national security?”
