Regina Ip says Hong Kong should enact Article 23 law as soon as possible with Legco now ‘more controllable’

Executive Council convener Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee said the SAR government should complete local legislation on Article 23 of the Basic Law as soon as possible with the Legislative Council now “more controllable” than in 2003.

Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law requires the SAR to enact laws on its own to prohibit seven categories of acts that endanger national security, including treason, sedition, subversion and theft of State secrets.

Some of the crimes are already covered by the National Security Law for Hong Kong, which took effect on June 30, 2020, prohibiting secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or external elements to endanger national security.

Ip’s comment came one day after chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu said that the government will "definitely" enact Article 23 legislation this year or by next year at the latest, adding there's a need to guard against national security risks.

Ip told a newspaper interview that there is no perfect timing to complete the legislation, but she noted that the situation at the Legislative Council now is “much more easier to control” than in 2003.

She believed that it is beneficial for Hong Kong to complete the legislation as soon as possible, with citizens having understood their constitutional responsibilities and having learned a lesson from events that happened in recent years.

Regarding the legislation of Article 23, which prohibits theft of state secrets, Ip acknowledged that there are differences between mainland China and Hong Kong on how to define state secrets. She described the issue as sensitive but did not explicitly spell out how the legislation could handle the issue.

Meanwhile, the former security chief also called on authorities to redefine laws regarding espionage, as the current laws localized from UK law in 1919 under the Official Secrets Ordinance were primitive and outdated.

She said that when authorities push forward with the legislation of Article 23, they must promote the fact that many countries around the world are revising their national security laws as well, such as the UK, Singapore, Australia, and the United States, which their laws are even stricter than Hong Kong.