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Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng meets the press on Tuesday after her trip to Beijing. Photo: May Tse

Anti-sanctions law will be wielded with care, Hong Kong justice minister vows

  • Fresh off her four-day visit to Beijing, Teresa Cheng offers assurances the law will only be used to counter unreasonable sanctions on the city and country
  • She refuses to say whether the national law will be inserted into Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, and dismisses concerns doing so would amount to a trend

Hong Kong’s justice minister has sought to ease anxiety over the implications for financial institutions when the city adopts Beijing’s anti-sanctions law, saying the legislation will be used only in retaliation for punitive actions taken by foreign governments.

In an interview with the Post and other media on Tuesday following her recent trip to the Chinese capital, Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah said: “I know some of us may be very concerned. But I think we shouldn’t be too worried for now.”

Having discussed the issue with mainland Chinese “legal minds” during her four-day trip, Cheng stressed that the law would be strictly retaliatory in nature as a counter to unreasonable sanctions imposed on the city and the country by foreign governments.

China’s top legislative body, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, is set to meet in mid-August to decide the adoption of Beijing’s legislation by Hong Kong on a local level.

Sources have said this will be done by inserting relevant provisions into the city’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, but Cheng said it was “too early” for such specifics.

However, she defended the central government’s right to take such a step if necessary, shrugging off worries that it might become a “trend” after Beijing introduced the city’s national security law in the same manner last year.

“I think it’s absolutely wrong to use that word. The Basic Law, when read as a whole, permits the national law to be put into annex III when it is foreign affairs, national security or matters that are not within the autonomy of Hong Kong,” she said.

Our own interests are trivial compared with the interests of the country’s 1.4 billion people
Teresa Cheng, justice minister

Passed in June, the national anti-sanctions law provides legal teeth for Beijing, along with private individuals and entities, to take countermeasures against “discriminatory restrictive measures” by foreign governments that “violate international laws and basic norms”.

Instead of being concerned about its implementation in Hong Kong, Cheng argued, people should ask why another jurisdiction should impose sanctions on the city in the first place.

Cheng took aim at the United States in particular, slamming it for being “hegemonic, unreasonable and disrespectful of the rule of law”.

While the US has sanctioned a number of Hong Kong and mainland officials to underscore its opposition to the city’s national security law, Cheng pointed out that having such legislation in place was every country’s prerogative to protect its interests.

Cheng herself was named in the US sanctions list last year, along with Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and several senior Hong Kong officials.
Last month, seven deputy directors of the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong were also sanctioned over what Washington called the erosion of freedoms in the city. The office’s director, Luo Huining, was sanctioned last year.

“Even though we’ve been sanctioned, our own interests are trivial compared with the interests of the country’s 1.4 billion people, with the unity, sovereignty and developmental interests of our nation,” said Cheng, formerly an internationally acclaimed arbitrator who headed the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre.

Hong Kong finance chief dangles local legislation for Beijing’s anti-sanctions law

She said mainland officials she met had praised Hong Kong’s Department of Justice for its work over the past year, as the city returned to stability following the anti-government protests and social turmoil of 2019.

During her Beijing trip, Minister of Public Security Zhao Kezhi asked her to help drive judicial reform, according to the ministry. Without referring to Zhao’s remarks, Cheng said concerns about judicial reform should not be “blown out of proportion”.

“Judicial reform is happening every day when the judiciary amends certain rules. That is judicial reform, isn’t it?” she said.

“To write it in a way or to ask it in a way that [suggests it] will affect judicial independence, I strongly resent that and I strongly rebuke that.”

Hong Kong must improve national security legislative work: top Beijing official

Both sides had agreed to stepped-up exchanges for lawyers and legal officers, Cheng added. For example, her department would team up with the Supreme People’s Court to provide exchanges for lawyers not familiar with legal procedures on the mainland, as well as for mainland judges hoping to understand the city’s common law. The Department of Justice would also enhance exchanges with the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, she said.

While she was away for her Beijing trip, more than 600 lawyers took part in the city’s first legal exam over the weekend to be allowed to practise mainland law in the Greater Bay Area (GBA), which groups nine Chinese cities alongside Hong Kong and Macau into an integrated economic hub.

The justice minister said it involved a lot of effort on the part of mainland authorities to move the exam to Hong Kong due to travel restrictions.

“I would very much like that the GBA exam would become more and more popular,” she said. “It provides immense opportunities for our lawyers in Hong Kong in order to broaden their perspectives, learn more laws and also to allow them to have a wider practice and therefore more business and be a little bit down to earth.”

Cheng declined to comment on Hong Kong’s first national security law case, citing possible pending appeals, after restaurant waiter Leon Tong Ying-kit was jailed for nine years last week on terrorism and secession charges.

But she weighed in on suggestions that the Bar Association and the Law Society, which regulate the city’s barristers and solicitors respectively, had become increasingly political.

Asked if the government had plans to take back their regulatory power if necessary, she said: “This is very far down the road and it’s very hard for me to give an answer to that scenario. I don’t think our barristers and solicitors would not cherish their self-regulatory mechanism.”

But she added: “Professional bodies should do what they know best professionally. If you politicise certain matters, the professional body would lose its focus.”

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