These days, the Hong Kong government’s actions to firm up or expand its power often seem superfluous. An example is recently proposed legislation that would let the city leader decree what constitutes a “national security offense” (Associated Press, June 8, 2026).
The Hong Kong government proposed legislation Monday that would allow the city’s leader to designate certain criminal acts as national security offenses, stepping up its efforts to stamp out challenges to its rules in the city where critics say freedoms have been eroding….
Hong Kong leader John Lee said Tuesday many activities endangering national security “are committed by state players” elsewhere and the sensitive information involved is privy to the chief executive, so the city leader bears such responsibility. Lee said he would exercise the power with prudence and seriousness.
“Having a clearer mechanism of classifying offenses endangering national security will have the benefit of reducing the risk of controversies or debates in court,” he said….
The legislation was meant to refine details of procedural matters and bring greater certainty, the authorities said. “The subsidiary legislation does not involve the creation of any new criminal offense, penalty or enforcement power,” they said.
Note the combination of talk about a “mechanism” for determining what constitutes an offense endangering national security with the stipulation that the city leader will alone make the determination. What mechanism? Lee is a person, not a procedure. The only procedure or mechanism anyone else will be able to follow is that of accepting that whatever he says goes (unless, which goes without saying, he’s overruled by Xi Jinping or some other CCP higher-up). This is the “procedure” or “mechanism” that any trampled populace exercises in relation to a dictator. If you submit, you have mastered the procedure.
A danger
A law professor at the University of Hong Kong, Simon Young, “said there is the danger of the chief executive relying upon secret information to judge the case as involving national security, leaving the defendant no room to contest the decision. ‘This is not new and something I had warned about from the beginning, the danger to the rule of law and fair trial from an unreviewable executive power to determine critical facts binding on the court.’ ”
No, it’s not new. So why are Lee and the rest bothering with this latest “clarification”?
At least since Beijing’s imposition of the National Security Law of 2020 and the “patriots-only” elimination of democracy in Hong Kong, the city leader and his cohorts have arrested and jailed advocates of freedom and democracy without any perceptible judicial or other rule-of-law-type restraints. With one or two marginal exceptions, they’re not slowed down by the courts or in any other way. What more power to act arbitrarily do they need? This is a government that has issued bounties on the heads of Hongkongers now living overseas in retaliation for speaking out against CCP tyranny. Legislators and judges have been mute.
Perhaps each incremental formal expansion of authority is a way for the Hong Kong rulers to say both “And we mean it” and to pretend that they do indeed defer in some relevant and laudable way to the requirements of “the rule of law,” a phrase often on the lips of Party propagandists. But the rule of law involves something different from periodic formal demonstrations, with or without the help of a rubber-stamp legislative body stuffed with “patriots,” that the rule of law is a dead letter.
