Hong Kong’s nightmare gets darker

At China’s behest, the city says people can now be charged retroactively for crimes that didn’t exist when they allegedly committed them.

Hong Kong’s national security law has already crushed the territory’s once-vibrant civic and political life. But now the city’s hard-line authorities are making the law even more repressive for anyone caught in its net.

Under updates which took effect this week, the city’s chief executive can classify any case as a national security crime under the 2020 law, even when the alleged offense was committed before that law took effect.

For good reasons, people cannot generally be told they violated a law that didn’t exist when they broke it. Yet Hong Kong’s leaders, beholden to China, don’t care.

The chief executive — picked by Beijing, with no popular mandate — now gets to classify any criminal act as a national security offense. The authorities classified this as housekeeping. Or as Chief Executive John Lee put it, the changes were designed “purely to make the law even clearer.”

But the authorities used a procedure to impose these changes without public comment and the usual legislative review.

Being charged with a national security offense carries enormous consequences for defendants. They can be jailed immediately and held for longer pre-trial detention periods. They are denied the ordinary presumption of innocence and denied bail. And they can be denied their choice of lawyer, as happened to newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai.

Their case is also heard before a judge chosen by — guess who? — the chief executive himself.

The Hong Kong Bar Association, in a tepid statement to the South China Morning Post, said the power to apply the sweeping law retroactively should be exercised “seriously and with added prudence” and urged authorities to provide “as much explanation as possible.” Little chance of that, since national security cases are generally shrouded in secrecy, mostly on the whims of Beijing.

The national security law has made Hong Kong a less secure place to visit or do business. These changes will further chill foreign investment. But the biggest victims are Hong Kongers themselves, who live in fear and lack the freedom to speak out against the deepening descent into autocracy.