Pro-Beijing lawmakers fast-tracked the legislation, with tough punishment for acts considered 'external interference,' insurrection and other offenses.
Hong Kong lawmakers have passed new national security legislation that carries severe punishment for a broad range of offenses, including life imprisonment for acts deemed to be insurrection., will toughen up the already stringent national security law Beijing implemented in 2020 following major pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong the prior year.
Hong Kong's lawmakers first tried to pass security legislation in 2003 but shelved it after mass protests against what residents feared was overreach from Beijing.of Hong Kong's mini-constitution called the Basic Law, which requires the city to enact its own laws"to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion" against the government, as well as bar foreign political organizations from conducting political activities there, among other provisions.
But Hong Kong's pro-Beijing lawmakers argued new legislation was needed to fill loopholes left by the sweeping 2020 law. "Now we would have had the offense of secession and subversion, overthrow of government, which means that if the rioters started waving pro-independence banners, we could have prosecuted them, which means that it would not have been necessary for Beijing to step in and introduce its own national security law," Regina Ip, a Hong Kong politician said on a Hong Kong talk show this year.is more aggressive than the version Ip proposed in 2003.
The vagueness of how terms like"national security" and"state secrets" are used in the new bill is alarming to legal experts like Alvin Cheung, an affiliate scholar at the U.S. Asia Law Institute at New York University.earlier this year that Hong Kong's government has been trying to target organizations of its citizens in exile in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
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