A high-profile British judge who resigned from Hong Kong’s highest court last week has warned the city is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and judges are being compromised by an “impossible political environment created by China”.
Lord Sumption’s comments on Monday came as a third senior foreign judge in the past week resigned from the Court of Final Appeal.
"The problem in Hong Kong has been building up over the last four years and I think all the judges on the court feel concerned about this," Lord Sumption told the BBC's Today programme.
"I have reached the point eventually where I don’t think that my continuing presence on the court is serving any useful purpose."
On Monday he wrote in a newspaper op-ed that the city's rule of law has been "profoundly compromised".
Hong Kong’s government said it "strongly disapproves" of Lord Sumption's opinions, calling them a "betrayal against Hong Kong's judges".
It highlighted remarks from the other leaving judges who said they still believed in the independence of the courts.
Canadian judge Beverley McLachlin, who resigned on Monday citing her wish to spend more time with family said: "I continue to have confidence in the members of the Court, their independence, and their determination to uphold the rule of law.”
But her departure as well as that of Lords Sumption and Lawrence Collins - another former UK Supreme Court justice- last week means at least six senior foreign judges have stepped down from sitting in Hong Kong since a major national security law (NSL) was imposed by China in 2020.
Lord Sumption has been much more overtly critical than his peers- arguing that the laws, which have been widely criticised as being draconian, have overridden the independent functioning of courts and heaped pressure on the judiciary.
“Intimidated or convinced by the darkening political mood, many judges have lost sight of their traditional role as defenders of the liberty of the subject, even when the law allows it,” he wrote in the Financial Times.
An 'oppressive' situation in Hong Kong
Speaking to the BBC on Monday, Lord Sumption said it had become increasingly clear that Hong Kong’s supercharged security laws were being used to "crush peaceful political dissent, not just riots."
Legal experts have for some time now warned about the city’s degraded rule of law in the wake of laws enacted by Beijing.
China and Hong Kong have defended the NSL laws as crucial to maintaining law and order in the city after major pro-democracy protests and unrest in 2019 and 2020.
But rights groups and Western governments say the law has been used to criminalise acts of free speech and assembly, leading to a near complete silencing of dissent in the global financial hub,.
More recently, the EU and the US heavily criticised as “politically motivated” the conviction of 14 democracy activists on 30 May for “subversion” . The defendants in the landmark Hong Kong 47 case face a minimum of 10 years in prison and could even be jailed for life.
That case "was the last straw", Lord Sumption said, referencing the court's assessment that organising a political primary was tantamount to a national security crime.
"The judgement... was a major indication of the lengths to which some judges are prepared to go to ensure that Beijing's campaign against those who have supported democracy succeeds."
He also emphasised the other major problem: "If China doesn't like the court's decisions it can reverse them."
Such a precedent was set in 2023, when in the high-profile prosecution of Hong Kong billionaire Jimmy Lai, Beijing overturned the Court of Final Appeal’s ruling to allow the democracy activist his choice of lawyer.
He also spoke of further pressures on judges, describing in his op-ed an “oppressive” environment. He wrote of the government’s “continued calls for judicial ‘patriotism’” and the outrage sparked in the rare instances when a judge acquits or grants bail to an NSL defendant.
“It requires unusual courage for local judges to swim against such a strong political tide. Unlike the overseas judges, they have nowhere else to go," he wrote.
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