My Take | Maligned Hong Kong security law looks a lot like its ‘Five Eyes’ predecessors
- City law professor and ex-chief prosecutor exposes how the local legislation is rooted in Anglo-American national security laws
Despite their incessant criticism, I have long suspected that the United States and the other “Five Eyes” countries with a common law tradition have similar if not even more draconian national security laws.
A new speech given by one of Hong Kong’s leading legal minds has confirmed my suspicions and then some. Grenville Cross SC was speaking at the weekend at the National Security Law Legal Forum.
Boy, was the comparison made by the University of Hong Kong law professor and former director of public prosecutions eye-opening.
Cross was specifically comparing the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) to similar laws in the other Anglo-American jurisdictions. He had less to say about the earlier national security law initiated by the mainland to cover Hong Kong.
It turns out a good deal of the SNSO was actually modelled on British legislation. For example, the offence of using computers or other electronic systems to endanger national security is mostly based on the UK’s Computer Misuse Act 1990, which prohibits any person from using such devices to threaten national security.
In both jurisdictions, Cross said, the respective laws target a hacker who “steals classified national security information, or gains control over strategic governmental electronic systems”. However, the maximum sentence for the offence is 20 years here whereas in the United Kingdom, it’s life imprisonment.