MPs said renewed extraditions could bring risks to Hong Kongers and others sanctioned by the Chinese regime.
The UK government is facing pressure from lawmakers to abandon its plan to resume the extradition arrangement with Hong Kong over concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could exploit the system to target dissidents.
Under the UK’s Extradition Act 2003, Hong Kong is designated as a category-2 territory, meaning the home secretary must issue a certificate upon receiving a valid request for extradition.
The Conservative government suspended the arrangement in July 2020 after Beijing imposed a national security law (NSL) that criminalizes acts of subversion, secession, and collusion with foreign forces. The law also allows the Chinese communist regime to assume jurisdiction over certain cases and try those cases in mainland Chinese courts.
The law has since been used to jail pro-democracy activists, including British citizen and media tycoon Jimmy Lai.
On July 17, the Labour government published a draft order to remove Hong Kong’s designation as a category-2 territory, so it can deal with Hong Kong’s extradition requests on a case-by-case basis.
The order would also enable extraditions to and from Chile and Zimbabwe.
The Home Office has not responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment at the time of publishing.
In a July 18 letter to Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Security Minister Dan Jarvis said it’s in the UK’s “national interest to have effective extradition relationships to prevent criminals from evading justice and the UK becoming a haven for fugitives.”
Philp said that since the suspension of extraditions, the UK has not been able to certify an extradition request from Hong Kong “even if there were strong operational grounds to do so,” and that the de-designation of Hong Kong as a category-2 territory will allow the UK to “cooperate with them on the case-by-case ad hoc basis available for non-treaty partners.”
In a July 23 letter to Jarvis, Shadow National Security Minister Alicia Kearns said the CCP’s NSL has “crushed freedom of expression, political freedom, and the rule of law in Hong Kong and introduced the possibility of extradition of Hong Kongers to mainland China,” which “operates an opaque legal system with the estimated highest number of executions of any country, with the figure kept secret by the CCP.”
By Lily Zhou
