Why should the United Kingdom ever agree to extradite anybody to the People’s Republic of China, of which Hong Kong is now a politically indistinguishable part? UK security chief Dan Jarvis has issued “clarifying” remarks about “inaccurate” reporting that don’t seem very clarifying (“UK to ‘never allow’ political extradition of Hongkongers after alarm over law changes,” Hong Kong Free Press, August 1, 2025).
Last month, [Jarvis] said the UK was planning to remove Hong Kong from the UK’s Extradition Act 2003, as it no longer had a formal extradition arrangement with the city after the UK scrapped the treaty in response to Beijing imposing a national security law in Hong Kong in 2020.
In place of that, the UK would cooperate with Hong Kong on “the case-by-case ad hoc basis available for non-treaty partners,” Jarvis added. [Emphasis added.]
In response, UK-based advocacy group Hong Kong Watch said the proposal could give rise to “opaque extradition cooperation outside the protections of a formal treaty-based system.”…
Jarvis said on Wednesday that the change—removing Hong Kong from the UK’s Extradition Act 2003—simply “formalises the severing of ties between the British and Hong Kong extradition systems.”
“The government will never allow a situation where [a Hongkonger or a person of] any other nationality is extradited for politically motivated purposes, he said, adding that UK courts have “extensive powers” and could bar extradition if it is determined that a request is political. [Emphasis added to underscore the fact that Jarvis is saying the exact same thing he was quoted as saying in the previous “inaccurate” reporting.]
So Jarvis (shown above) is still implying that if the PRC is diligent enough in hiding its political motives for making a politically motivated extradition request and in manufacturing a persuasive enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing (“criminal” in a Western sense), the hapless Hongkonger targeted for extradition will have to fight for his right not to be cast back into the totalitarian maw in British courts that may or may not exercise their “extensive powers” intelligently and justly.
If you have some sense of what has been going on politically in the United Kingdom for the past umpteen years or so, you know that neither the perfect and infallible justice of the British political system nor the rudimentary capacity to distinguish fact from folly of any of its power-wielders can be taken for granted.
Case by case
In 2019, hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest a proposed arrangement for extraditing Hongkonger or resident foreign suspects to the mainland, an arrangement that would have facilitated arrest and imprisonment of Hongkongers by the Chinese Communist Party for political reasons. Of course, that battle has been lost. After the National Security Law of 2020, what remained of Hong Kong’s rights and liberties—which had been continually under threat ever since the 1997 handover—was rapidly extinguished, and no major political difference any longer prevails between Hong Kong and the mainland. Which means that, today, extraditing a person to Hong Kong is the same thing as extraditing that person to Red China.
Blithe assurances and stark realities do not always dovetail. It’s good that we have assurances from Jarvis that the old extradition agreement with Hong Kong is dead and that the UK would never cooperate with a PRC request for extradition of the pro-democracy activists in pursuit of whom the Hong Kong government has issued arrest warrants and bounties. It’s bad that “nonpolitical” extradition to Red China still seems to be a formally provided-for possibility.
Principals of the UK government assure everybody that the government will defend the rights of the Hongkongers living in the UK. But this is the same United Kingdom in which the London police recently urged prominent pro-democracy activist Carmen Lau, who several years ago moved from Hong Kong to Britain, to sign a document agreeing to stop speaking out politically so as to reduce her risk of being harassed, within the United Kingdom, by the Chinese Communist Party. In what kind of political environment did the London police feel comfortable making such a request?
Step by step
This is also the same United Kingdom the government of which is now proposing to “double the waiting time to qualify for the pathway to settlement in the UK from five years to ten years” with “no mention of whether or not this would apply to the British National Overseas (BNO) visa scheme, established for Hong Kongers in 2020 in response to Beijing’s crackdown. If it does, it would deal a devastating blow to thousands of families who escaped repression in Hong Kong and have begun to build a new life here.”
Also see:
Hong Kong Watch: “ ‘Now is not the time to abandon Hong Kongers’, Benedict Rogers”
