On Tuesday, March 19, Hong Kong passed the Safeguarding National Security Bill and announced that the law would take effect just four days later, on March 23. Together with the Law of the People's Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region enacted by Beijing in June 2020, this amounts to two atomic bombs dropped on Hong Kong — utterly destroying the freedom, rule of law, and economic prosperity that this city once took such pride in and that had somehow survived, however diminished, through the 27 years since its handover to China.
This piece of legislation is known in Hong Kong as the "Article 23" legislation, because its legal basis comes from Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. That article of the Basic Law states: "The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies."
Yet whether this legal basis actually holds up is highly questionable.
First, basic legal common sense tells us that the purpose of any legislation must not contradict the constitution or the general principles of the Basic Law. The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China explicitly provides, in Article 11 of its General Principles chapter, that "no law enacted by the legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall contravene this Law," and further states that "the systems... for safeguarding the fundamental rights and freedoms of its residents" and related policies must be based on the provisions of the Basic Law. Likewise, Article 4 of Chapter One, General Principles, states: "The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall safeguard the rights and freedoms of the residents of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and of other persons in the Region in accordance with law."
It is quite clear that the Hong Kong Basic Law never states that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region may "lawfully restrict and strip away" the rights and freedoms of its people. The "Article 23" legislation now promulgated — the Safeguarding National Security Bill — directly contradicts the Basic Law in its very legislative purpose. This Safeguarding National Security Bill is therefore illegitimate.
Second, we can further examine what the Basic Law provides regarding residents' fundamental rights. The Hong Kong Basic Law devotes an entire chapter (Chapter Three) to "Fundamental Rights and Duties of the Residents." This chapter contains nineteen articles, and from Article 25 through Article 41, at least seventeen of them concern the freedoms and rights of Hong Kong residents. The Basic Law explicitly states: "Hong Kong residents shall have freedom of speech, of the press and of publication; freedom of association, of assembly, of procession and of demonstration; and the right and freedom to form and join trade unions, and to strike"; "The freedom of the person of Hong Kong residents shall be inviolable"; "Hong Kong residents shall have freedom to engage in academic research, literary and artistic creation, and other cultural activities"; and it expressly provides: "No Hong Kong resident shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful arrest, detention or imprisonment. Arbitrary or unlawful search of the body of any resident or deprivation or restriction of the freedom of the person shall be prohibited. Torture of any resident and arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of the life of any resident shall be prohibited."
A brief examination of the current Safeguarding National Security Bill reveals that numerous provisions in it clearly and directly contradict the above provisions of the Basic Law. On this basis as well, the current Safeguarding National Security Bill is illegitimate.
Further, Article 39 of the Basic Law provides that "the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and international labour conventions as applied to Hong Kong shall remain in force," and that any restriction on the rights and freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong residents, even through legislation, shall not contravene the relevant provisions of the aforementioned covenants.
It is quite clear that numerous provisions of the current Safeguarding National Security Bill directly contradict the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and international labour conventions — and this law is therefore illegitimate on this basis as well.
The 'Article 23' Legislation Is a Wicked Law
Of course, before the Chinese Communist Party, every single law of the People's Republic of China can be treated as waste paper, and the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is unlikely to be an exception. To trample upon laws of one's own making is wicked governance; and to disregard existing law while acting, through a whole series of actions, in direct contravention of it, is nothing less than treason and sedition! Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, quoted above, requires that "the Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason" and "sedition," yet the current "Article 23" legislation is itself, in practice, an act of treason and sedition. Traitors seize the state, and insurrectionists seize power — that is the true meaning of today's "Article 23" legislation.
In the end, any law that goes against the will of the people is illegitimate. To resist the "Article 23" legislation, which is designed to strip the people of their rights and freedoms, the people of Hong Kong waged a heroic struggle for 21 years. As early as 2003, the Hong Kong SAR government, following the wishes of Beijing's authoritarian regime, put the "Article 23" legislation on its agenda. This triggered a march by 500,000 people through the streets of Hong Kong on July 1, 2003, the sixth anniversary of the handover of sovereignty to China. That protest march became the largest demonstration to take place in Hong Kong since Chinese people around the world protested Beijing's Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. In the years that followed, the scale of the protests kept growing and the number of participants kept increasing, expressing the will of the Hong Kong people clearly and forcefully. But traitors to the nation are inevitably enemies of the popular will, and Beijing and the Hong Kong authorities have finally dropped these two atomic bombs upon the people of Hong Kong!
One can well imagine what kind of picture Hong Kong will present once it has been destroyed by this illegitimate legal atomic bomb. In recent years, the authorities have already carried out a major crackdown on the publishing and news industries, brutally suppressed the Occupy Central movement (the "Umbrella Revolution") and the anti-extradition movement (the "Revolution of Our Times"), gutted an electoral system that once allowed for a modest degree of political competition, and implemented CCP-style "brainwashing" in primary and secondary education — effectively abolishing the so-called "one country, two systems" framework already. The next step, with the emergence of the Safeguarding National Security Bill, will surely be a further stripping away of the people's basic rights and freedoms. Among the sectors likely to be targeted for the next crackdown are higher education, healthcare, and the legal profession. In Hong Kong, these sectors possess relatively high standards of professional integrity — and it is precisely such professional integrity that authoritarian politics cannot tolerate. What it demands instead is political submission stripped of any moral bottom line and any awareness of the law. A Hong Kong society once known for being law-abiding, hardworking, and kind will, under the protection and encouragement of a wicked law like the Safeguarding National Security Bill, become a society in which evil forces flood in through the front door and run rampant.