‘Alarmingly deteriorating’ situation: EU lawmakers renew calls for sanctions on Hong Kong leaders

EU lawmakers have renewed calls for sanctions on senior Hong Kong leaders over the “deterioration of fundamental freedoms” in the city.

In a vote on Thursday, lawmakers adopted by a landslide a resolution condemning the “alarmingly deteriorating” situation in Hong Kong since the imposition of a national security law by Beijing in 2020.

The vote was: 483 for, nine against, while 42 lawmakers abstained.

The lawmakers voted on a cross-party urgency resolution, a non-binding tool designed to express the European Parliament’s views on a human rights situation.

During a debate on the resolution on Wednesday night, members of parliament lined up in Strasbourg to criticise the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing for a crackdown that wiped out the city’s political opposition, saw a purge of critical local media, and saw hundreds jailed.

“What are they afraid of? The answer is simple: they are afraid of freedom-loving people like Jimmy Lai, because they are the biggest threat to the lies and oppression of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” said Miriam Lexmann, a Slovak lawmaker from the centre-right European People’s Party, who was sanctioned by Beijing in 2021.

Marie-Pierre Vedrenne, a French lawmaker from the centrist Renew Group, said the parliament was obliged to support Hong Kong, to show that Europe “will not be intimidated at a time at which authoritarianism is on the rise throughout the world”.

“We must show that Europe should stand shoulder to shoulder with them. We will never let them down,” Vedrenne said.

A solitary lawmaker, the Left group’s Mick Wallace, took to the floor to defend the Chinese government.

“The idea that we have the right to lecture China about what’s going on in Hong Kong, who in God’s name are we to be lecturing anybody? Why don’t we actually sort out things in our own place?,” said Wallace, a controversial figure who visited China in April and featured heavily on state media.

However, voting records show that Wallace subsequently voted in favour of the resolution.

The resolution called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, the media mogul founder of Apple Daily, who is set to stand trial without a jury on charges of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign forces.

It criticised the Hong Kong government’s decision to bar a British lawyer from representing Lai in a collusion trial.

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It expressed “deep concern” over the “lengthy pre-trial detention, in very difficult conditions”, facing some prisoners, including some with “very precarious health conditions”. On this front, the resolution named Chow Hang-tung and Albert Ho, jailed activists who were on hunger strike and suffered from cancer, respectively.

Chow, one of the activists behind Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square vigil, was jailed for breaches of the Beijing-imposed national security law but later acquitted. Ho is a former opposition lawmaker who was arrested in March for allegedly perverting the course of justice. He was accused of violating his bail conditions ahead of a subversion trial.

The resolution called for “targeted sanctions under the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime against John Lee and all other Hong Kong and PRC officials responsible for the ongoing human rights crackdown in the city”.

It urged Brussels to “adequately support” the EU office in Hong Kong to “intensify trial observation” in the city, and demanded the EU request prison visits for the pro-democracy camp members who have been jailed.

Addressing the parliament on Wednesday, Kadri Simson, an EU commissioner, said the bloc “will continue to raise the situation in Hong Kong both publicly and privately”.

“The UN Human Rights Committee recommendation to immediately repeal the national security law and sedition provisions of the Crimes Ordinance and stop implementing them was echoed in the strongest words at the human rights dialogue with China,” Simson said.

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In reality, though, the situation in Hong Kong has fallen from the mainstream agenda in Brussels.

Efforts to adopt new measures to punish the Hong Kong government for the imposition of the national security law were shelved more than two years ago after failing to gain unanimity among the bloc’s 27 members, and have not been revisited since.

Some diplomats, speaking privately, wondered whether member states are even keeping to the conclusions they adopted in July 2020, in response to the security law, which included “not launching any new negotiations with Hong Kong”.