Three Years in, Hong Kong’s National Security Law Has Entrenched a New Status Quo
on September 6, 2023
On March 20, 2023, a Hong Kong court sentenced three people to prison for sedition. Police had arrested them in January, during and after a raid on a book fair in Mong Kok, for the purported crime of selling self-published books about the city’s 2019 protest movement. All three pleaded guilty, received sentences of between five and ten months and pledged to refrain from such acts in future. Their sedition convictions illustrate the evolution in the government’s use of Hong Kong’s National Security Law and sedition provision of the Hong Kong Crimes Ordinance, a British colonial-era law that officials revived after the 2019 protests. By spring 2022, nearly two years after the NSL came into effect, the government had largely succeeded in using national security laws to reshape political and civic institutions and life in Hong Kong. Opposition political parties were decimated, civil society groups closed down, and once-vibrant media outlets were shuttered. Scores of top pro-democratic figures had either been arrested or fled Hong Kong. Those who have not been arrested and who have chosen to remain have been forced to watch what they say, otherwise they too could be prosecuted for a national security crime.
