LONDON (AP) – Britain said Wednesday that it is withdrawing its judges from Hong Kong’s top court because keeping them there would “legitimize oppression” in the former British colony.
British judges have sat on the court since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997. The British government’s move underscores the Asian financial hub´s growing isolation as the ruling Chinese Communist Party works to assert its control and silence independent voices.
The government said it was “no longer tenable for serving U.K. judges” to sit on the Court of Final Appeal because of the increasingly oppressive laws enacted by China. The two British judges on the court submitted their resignations Wednesday.
China has gradually chipped away at Hong Kong’s separate political, legal and social institutions in recent years. Those efforts include passage of the sweeping National Security Law in 2020 and changes to the electoral system that have effectively ended political opposition in the territory.
The security law has prompted complaints that Beijing was eroding the autonomy promised when Hong Kong was transferred back to China as a “special administrative region” and ruining its status as a trade and financial center.
The law has been used to imprison pro-democracy figures from Hong Kong. They include Jimmy Lai, the 74-year-old former publisher of the Apple Daily newspaper, which shut down under government pressure, and organizers of candlelight memorials of the party’s deadly 1989 crackdown on a pro-democracy movement.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss says that “since the National Security Law was imposed, authorities have cracked down on free speech, the free press and free association. ”
“The situation has reached a tipping point where it is no longer tenable for British judges to sit on Hong Kong’s leading court, and would risk legitimizing oppression,” Truss said.
She said the decision to pull British judges out after many years in Hong Kong was taken by the British government in consultation with the head of the U.K. Supreme Court.
Conservative British lawmaker Iain Duncan Smith, a longtime critic of the government in Beijing, said “the government has done the right thing here, and not a minute too soon.”
“What Ukraine teaches us is that you simply cannot appease totalitarian states or make excuses for their behavior, which is exactly what the presence of our judges were doing in Hong Kong,” Smith said. “They were lending legitimacy to a regime hell-bent on undermining our way of life.”