Rights Advocates Urge More Foreign Judges to Cut Ties With Hong Kong

The Hong Kong High Court on June 21, 2021. (Sung Pi-lung/The Epoch Times)

Human rights advocates are urging all remaining foreign judges in Hong Kong to resign from the city’s highest court in a bid to reject the Chinese regime’s suppression of civil liberties.

Three foreign judges recently resigned from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal (CFA).

Canada’s former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, 80, announced her resignation from the CFA in a statement on June 10, citing her age and a desire to spend more time with family as reasons for her departure.

The departure of Lords Lawrence Collins and Jonathan Sumption from the CFA on May 7 came a week after the city’s most recent national security case in which 14 democracy activists were convicted of subversion.

Benedict Rogers, co-founder and chief executive of Hong Kong Watch, welcomed the resignations of Lords Collins and Sumptions. “Their decision is long overdue, but better late than never,” he wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on June 7.

Lord Collins wrote that he stepped down from his post “because of the political situation in Hong Kong,” adding that he continued to “have the fullest confidence in the court and the total independence of its members.”

John Lee, Hong Kong’s current top leader, expressed disappointment over the resignations of Lords Collins and Sumption and justified the city’s security laws by stating that Hong Kong had “transitioned from chaos to order.”

Seven foreign judges remain on Hong Kong’s CFA: three from the UK and four from Australia.

Foreign judges serve as non-permanent appointees to help maintain the British-style common law legal system. This is part of the agreement between China and the UK that stipulates Hong Kong would continue to operate with its freedoms and systems—including its common law legal system—for 50 years after the city was handed back to the communist regime in 1997.

However, some Western countries, legal experts, and rights advocates have raised concerns that Hong Kong’s rule of law and judicial independence have been significantly eroded in recent years since Beijing imposed the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020.

Moreover, in March this year, Hong Kong authorities passed the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, commonly known as Article 23. Critics say the new security law could further erode the city’s freedoms and undermine its reputation as a global financial hub.

Mr. Rogers said both laws are “draconian and repressive.”

“The presence of foreign judges—previously intended to offer some reassurance—now serves no purpose other than to give credibility to a system that is rapidly losing all credibility, and legitimacy to a system that has lost legitimacy,” Mr. Rogers told The Epoch Times in an email on May 7.

He urged the other remaining foreign judges to “follow the example of Lord Collins and Lord Sumption, and do so without delay.”

Alyssa Fong, the public affairs advocacy manager for the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation (CFHK), agreed with Mr. Rogers’s viewpoint.

“We have long advocated that no foreign judges should continue to give any form of credibility to the Hong Kong courts and Beijing’s authoritarian crackdown,” she told The Epoch Times on June 8.

“Those judges that remain in their positions must take [the] lead from these two British judges and resign [from] their positions immediately,” she added.

Gordon Poon, Hong Kong writer and commentator who now resides in the UK, told The Epoch Times on June 7 that the Lords’ decisions were “no surprise,” and said, “I speculate more departures will likely follow.”

On May 10, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China published a report calling on the U.S. government to use the power granted by the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and the Hong Kong Autonomy Act to impose sanctions on financial institutions, prosecutors, judges, and other individuals involved in undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and rights.

Months after the NSL passed in 2020, Australian Judge James Spigelman resigned over concerns about the content of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) national security law.

In 2022, after the UK government raised concerns and welcomed the withdrawal of serving British judges from the CFA, UK Supreme Court Justices Robert Reed and Patrick Hodge cut ties with the Hong Kong court.

Hundreds of people have been arrested under the CCP’s National Security Law, including British citizen and media tycoon Jimmy Lai. He was first arrested on Aug. 10, 2020, and later convicted for “unauthorized assembly” for participating in a Tiananmen Square vigil on June 4, 2020. Mr. Lai has been jailed and then granted bail multiple times since then.

On June 11, Hong Kong prosecutors closed their case against Mr. Lai, and the proceedings are set to resume in July, according to Hong Kong Free Press. Mr. Lai’s legal team plans to present a “no case to answer” argument, aiming to secure an acquittal by asserting that the prosecution’s evidence is insufficient.

Another prominent Hong Kong figure is Barrister Margaret Ng, a member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong. She was arrested in December 2021 and charged with conspiracy to publish seditious publications.

Ms. Fong urged one of the remaining foreign judges, Lord David Neuberger, to “stick to his word and truly do what is best for the Hong Kong people when he rules on the appeal cases of pro-democracy figures such as Jimmy Lai and Margaret Ng at the end of the month.”

Sophia Lam and Andrew Chen contributed to this report.