The law will prohibit the crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign and external influences to threaten national security.

National security law may be imminent as China’s top body to meet next week

Xinhua’s statement said local bodies would take charge of almost all investigations and prosecutions, a new commission focusing on the law with a Beijing-appointed adviser would be chaired by the chief executive, and a mainland agency, named the Office of the National Security Commissioner of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, would be set up in the city.

The city’s leader would have the power to appoint judges to hear trials, while Beijing would exercise jurisdiction in a small number of cases.

The statement also said the law would provide safeguards to uphold international human rights standards and the presumption of innocence, among other freedoms, although critics pointed to an omission on the issue of retrospectivity.

Earlier, Deng Zhonghua, deputy director of the cabinet-level Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, said the law would not be retroactive.

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Hongkongers fearing national security law see BN(O) passports as sign of hope

Hongkongers fearing national security law see BN(O) passports as sign of hope

But in an interview with the Global Times newspaper on Saturday, Beijing legal academic Tian Feilong suggested the impending legislation could be applied to cases related to the city’s protests, which erupted in June last year, as they were not “past events”, but “ongoing events”.

Tian, a Hong Kong affairs expert at Beihang University in Beijing, told the Post on Sunday the new law was likely to be enacted against a backdrop of judicial proceedings arising from the protests and that police had yet to finish their investigations into some cases.

He suggested: “Protesters involved in local terrorism activities or who collaborated with foreign forces might be punished by the new national security law as long as their acts of endangering national security are still happening or police haven’t finished evidence collection.”

But Philip Dykes, head of the Hong Kong Bar Association, said a person had to continue with an act after the law was enacted to be caught. “You will need to do something after [enactment] to make it criminal,” he said.

University of Hong Kong law dean Fu Hualing, who was familiar with both mainland law and the city’s common law, said it would be for the court to decide whether an act continued long enough to fall within its jurisdiction. But he said the scenario floated by Tian was “simply not possible”.

However, Basic Law Committee member and pro-establishment legislator Priscilla Leung Mei-fung, a barrister and law lecturer, believed Tian was referring to the well-known concept of continuous act. For instance, she said, if an organisation had been providing funding to protesters to engage in certain activities banned by the law, and continued to do so after the legislation was enacted, it could face charges.

Ling Bing, a professor of Chinese law at the University of Sydney, said under mainland legal principles, offenders would only be punished if they carried on with a criminal act after a law was enacted.

“It is immaterial whether the pre-enactment and post-enactment acts may be considered to form the same social or political movement,” he said.

Veteran activist Lee Cheuk-yan accused Beijing of deliberately being vague on the issue of retrospectivity. “They will never let you know whether it is going to be retrospective or definitely not retrospective to make you fearful,” he said.

Although Tam Yiu-chung, the city’s sole delegate to the standing committee, had said the law would not be retrospective, Elsie Leung Oi-sie, former vice-chairwoman of the Basic Law Committee, did not rule out it out, saying it was to prevent people from committing related offences during the run-up to the enactment.

Additional reporting by Echo Xie