British Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday all but confirmed that the UK would suspend an extradition treaty with Hong Kong owing to a National Security Law imposed by Beijing, bringing another clash with China following last week’s decision over Huawei Technologies Co (華為).
Speaking on a visit to a school in Kent, England, Johnson said that British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab would explain later yesterday “about how we are going to change our extradition arrangements to reflect our concerns about what’s happening with the security law in Hong Kong.”
Raab was due to address the UK House of Commons yesterday afternoon and was widely expected to suspend extradition to Hong Kong in light of the law, which effectively criminalizes most political dissent and can even target actions outside of Hong Kong or mainland China.
Photo: AFP
The US, Canada and Australia have already taken similar actions over extradition to Hong Kong.
Earlier yesterday, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said such a move by the UK, plus other mooted plans, such as actions against individual Chinese officials due to rights abuses, would harm relations between the two countries.
“These HK-related remarks turn a blind eye to the basic facts that the National Security Law is for the sustained success of ‘one China, two systems,’” Wang said, referring to the system by which Hong Kong has been governed since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Photo: Reuters
“We strongly condemn these actions. We urge the UK to take no more steps down the wrong path, so as to avoid further damage to China-UK relations,” he said.
The UK government last week said it would strip the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei of any role in the UK’s 5G network from 2027 owing to security concerns, which also enraged Beijing.
Johnson, during the school visit, said he did not seek confrontation with China, but the UK had grave concerns about Hong Kong and widespread reports of mass repression and rights abuses targeting the Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang region.
These have included accounts of forced sterilization of Uighur women and the incarceration of huge numbers of people in what appear to be concentration camps.
“There is a balance here,” Johnson said. “I’m not going to be pushed into a position of becoming a knee-jerk Sinophobe on every issue, somebody who is automatically anti-China. But we do have serious concerns. We have concerns about the treatment of the Uighur minority obviously, about the human rights abuses.”
“China is a giant factor of geopolitics, it’s going to be a giant factor in our lives and in the lives of our children and grandchildren. You have got to have a calibrated response and we are going to be tough on some things, but also going to continue to engage,” he added.
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