Free Chow Hang Tung

In 1984 Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiao Ping signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong. It provided that the United Kingdom was to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, but that Hong Kong was to keep its own government and its traditional freedoms, including free speech, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, freedom of religion, property rights and many other specified rights for 50 years until 2047. The Sino-British Declaration was registered at the United Nations as a treaty and remains binding on both the UK and China. This separate regime for Hong Kong from that in Mainland China was described as ‘One country, two systems’.

Between 1997 and 2019 ‘One country, two systems’ worked relatively well. Life in Hong Kong continued much as before its return to China. It was never a full democracy, but it had a partly elected Legislative Council, a vibrant free press, a flourishing cultural life and a legal system which generally respected and recognised human rights.

All that changed after 2019, when the Hong Kong government introduced a Fugitive Offenders Bill, which would have allowed extradition from Hong Kong to mainland China. This generated huge protests, as people were afraid of being sent to the mainland for unfair trials for political offences. When the Hong Kong government remained intransigent in the face of ever larger protests, law and order eventually broke down with pitched battles between police and protesters. The response of the Chinese government was to pass the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020, which effectively removed many of the rights and freedoms Hong Kong had previously enjoyed.

The National Security Law was a gross and blatant breach of the 1984 Joint Declaration. It was followed by mass arrests of pro-democracy politicians and activists, closure of pro-democracy media and trade unions, expulsion of many pro-democracy civil servants from their jobs and a mass exodus from Hong Kong by people who could not bear to live under a repressive Communist system.

Britain reacted honourably to the situation, extending the right to move to the UK to anyone who was born in Hong Kong before 1997 and their dependants. Since then, however, Britain has done very little, despite its continuing legal responsibilities to the people of Hong Kong as one of the two guarantors of the Joint Declaration. Some 170,000 eligible Hong Kongers have come to the UK since the National Security Law and thousands have gone elsewhere but over four million remain in Hong Kong.

The years since 2020 have seen a series of highly controversial trials which many would regard as unfair and politically motivated. The conviction of the ‘Democratic 45’, politicians who had organised a democratic primary election which was said to be illegal, led the British judge Lord Sumption to resign from Hong Kong’s highest court in 2024, citing it as an instance of increasing authoritarianism. The leading pro-democracy figure and former newspaper tycoon Jimmy Lai, a British citizen, is currently on trial for the new National Security Law offence of ‘collusion with foreign forces’. Bail is not permitted in national security cases unless the judge is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused will not commit any national security offences on bail. The national security offences are nowhere defined, which makes it very difficult for a judge to be sure beyond reasonable doubt. The result is that bail is rarely granted and many accused in national security cases have now spent years in prison on remand.

One of those who has been remanded for years is a barrister called Chow Hang Tung. She and others are charged with subversion. Their ‘crime’ is being the organisers of the large public annual vigil which was held in Hong Kong every year on 4 June from 1990 to 2020, to commemorate the victims of the Beijing Massacre on 4 June 1989. The peaceful candlelit vigil, attended by thousands, was always a call for a democratic China, organised by a group called the Hong Kong Alliance in support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China. Chow Hang Tung’s ‘crime’ with her two co-defendants, trade unionist Lee Cheuk Yan and respected human rights lawyer Albert Ho, is being a leader of that group.

When I was in practice as a senior counsel in Hong Kong, Chow Hang Tung assisted me several times in important cases. I found her exceptionally able, with a rare gift of ‘thinking outside the box’ to find compelling arguments that no-one else had thought of. Her back story is unusual. After getting the top A-Level grades in her year in the whole of Hong Kong she studied as a scientist at Cambridge University and became a vulcanologist, a specialist in earthquakes and volcanoes. For her doctorate she studied the causes of the Szechuan Earthquake of 2008, which killed some 70,000 people. Her research was tending to show that the earthquake had been made much worse than it would otherwise have been because of irresponsible siting, by the Chinese government, of a reservoir near a known earthquake fault. But as she was getting near completion of her study the Chinese government removed all the earthquake sensors from the area, preventing her from getting the records she needed to finish.

After that experience she decided to retrain as a barrister and work to promote human rights.

Chow Hang Tung has now been in prison since 2021. She was 36 when she was detained and had become engaged at about that time. She has served a short sentence for attempting to organise a vigil in 2021 when demonstrations were banned, but most of her time in prison has been on remand simply awaiting trial. Like her co-defendants, she is detained simply for exercising the rights of free speech and freedom of assembly which were guaranteed to them by Britain and China in 1984, and which are exercised by everyone in the UK all the time. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated that her detention is arbitrary, and Amnesty International has recognised her as a Prisoner of Conscience.

I tried to raise the subject of the political prisoners in Hong Kong with Sir Keir Starmer KC, then Leader of the Opposition, when I met him at Doughty Street Chambers early in 2024, but unfortunately Keir did not stop to listen. This was a bad omen for the attitude of a new Labour government towards Hong Kong. Since then my fears have been realised as I watched Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ trade promotion visit to Beijing in which Hong Kong seems to have been studiously ignored.

Contrary to the view of some commentators, Britain is now in a strong position to act on behalf of Chow Hang Tung and her fellow prisoners of conscience. With rising United States and European Union tariffs on Chinese goods, there is an obvious coincidence of economic interest for Britain and China in increased trade between the two countries. But this must not be at the expense of those whom Britain is pledged to protect. This is not a call for pointless grandstanding denunciations, which just provoke propaganda responses, but for hard-nosed bargaining, with restoration of the rights guaranteed by the Joint Declaration as one of Britain’s objectives. Recent reports suggest that prospective additional sales of Chinese electric vehicles in the United Kingdom may create 100,000 new jobs in China. Set against that prospect, the release of political prisoners in Hong Kong would seem, from China’s point of view, a small price to pay.

I very much hope that the Prime Minister and his government will pay attention to the issue of Chow Hang Tung and her fellow detainees and secure their release. They have a good chance of achieving this if they want to. Failure to try would be unforgivable.