Hong Kong extradition bill: government looks at allowing prison terms to be served in city

Secretary for Security John Lee said a number of concessions could be granted to make controversial proposal more palatable

Government may also consider a demand from the business community to raise threshold for extradition to crimes punishable by seven years in prison

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Guangdong Provincial Police hand over three suspects in a goldsmiths robbery case to Hong Kong Police at the Huanggang port. Photo: Edward Wong

Published: 10:10pm, 28 May 2019Updated: 5:34pm, 3 Jun 2019

Hong Kong’s security chief says the government will look into the possibility of allowing local criminal suspects transferred to mainland China for trial to serve their sentences in the city, among other concessions to make the controversial extradition bill more palatable.

In a television interview on Tuesday, Secretary for Security John Lee Ka-chiu also reflected a willingness to seriously consider a key demand from the business community for the threshold for extradition to be raised so that only those accused of crimes punishable by seven years or more could be sent across the border.

Earlier on Tuesday, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor promised to respond by Saturday to calls for more human rights safeguards to be built into the bill, which would allow the transfer of suspects to jurisdictions with which Hong Kong has no extradition agreement, including mainland China, Taiwan and Macau.

Lam dismissed as “exaggerated” increasingly vocal concerns raised by Western governments about the bill being used as a weapon against Beijing’s critics, even as thousands of students, teachers and alumni from all the city’s public universities and one in seven secondary schools added their names to a barrage of petitions against changing the city’s extradition laws.

“This can be considered,” Lee said when asked about allowing Hongkongers to serve their jail terms in Hong Kong after sentencing on the mainland. “We have existing legislation that lets those serving time overseas to serve their sentences in Hong Kong.”

Referring to the Transfer of Sentenced Persons Ordinance, which does not apply to the mainland, Lee said the government would have to negotiate with authorities across the border for another legal amendment to enable such an arrangement.

If the threshold for extradition is raised to cover crimes punishable by at least seven years behind bars instead of three years under the current legislation, bribery and forgery would still be extraditable offences under Hong Kong law, but offences such as assault occasioning bodily harm would not count.