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Three-and-a-half years after sweeping, Beijing-imposed national security legislation took impact in Hong Kong, remaking the city within the authoritarian mold of its sovereign mainland grasp, the native authorities on Tuesday unveiled details for a new security law.
Chief executive John Lee painted a hazy image of lurking risks threatening to destabilize Hong Kong, regardless of the 2020 nationwide safety legislation that authorities declare have “perfected” native political circumstances.
“Whereas we, society as an entire, appears to be like calm and appears very protected, we nonetheless need to be careful for potential sabotage, undercurrents that attempt to create troubles,” Lee said, including that “international brokers” should still be working within the metropolis in a “misleading approach” and “embedding” secessionist concepts within the public’s thoughts.
In presenting nebulous but pressing threats that solely a robust state can neutralize, Lee is straight echoing Beijing’s propaganda line, which has more and more depicted society as one besieged by “suspicious” activity that threatens to undermine national security.
“We are able to’t afford to attend. … The threats to nationwide safety—they’re actual,” Lee stated.
An deliberately obscure definition of “state secrets and techniques”
In a 110-page document submitted to the city legislature, authorities suggest updating or creating new legal guidelines to cowl crimes together with espionage, theft of state secrets and techniques, “incitement to disaffection,” and using computer systems and digital programs to commit acts endangering nationwide safety.
Notably, the proposed set of recent legal guidelines, known as Article 23, would criminalize the theft or illegal disclosure of “state secrets and techniques.” But the time period is so vaguely outlined that something might plausibly match below the umbrella of “state secrets and techniques”—a time period that present native legal guidelines don’t use, besides in reference to the necessity to enact Article 23.
Authorities advocate defining state secrets and techniques to incorporate data on the financial, social, and technological growth of China and Hong Kong that might “would seemingly endanger nationwide safety” if unlawfully disclosed. What constitutes endangerment of nationwide safety is presumably left to the federal government’s discretion.
The consequence: The federal government turns into decide, jury, and executioner of what makes one thing a bit of knowledge and one thing else a state secret.
That is by design. Take China’s just lately revised counterespionage legislation: It added a catch-all phrase in its definition of espionage to incorporate not simply state secrets and techniques and intelligence, but in addition “different paperwork, knowledge, supplies, or gadgets associated to nationwide safety.” In the meantime, Beijing is engaged on updating its state secrets and techniques legislation to expand its coverage.
For now, authorities will maintain a 100-day public session on the proposed safety laws. However with all opposition politicians and activists either in jail or exile, and any public demonstration in opposition to the federal government more likely to be punished by jail time, the Hong Kong authorities’s safety want record will nearly actually come true.
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