Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I lead the international legal team for Jimmy Lai and for his son, Sébastien Lai, whom you've just heard from. I work along with my colleague, Jonathan Price, who's here today with me.
It's often said that journalists don't want to ever become the story, but Jimmy Lai has become the story, and it's one that the world needs to hear. It's the story that you've just heard from his son, Sébastien, the story of a hugely successful and self-made businessman who, in 1989, so affected was he by the Tiananmen Square bloodshed, decided to risk it all to speak truth to power and to stand up to human rights abuses and CCP corruption in Beijing.
In my opening remarks, I want to highlight three themes about Jimmy Lai's detention.
The first theme I will term "lawfare" because Jimmy Lai was targeted for decades for doing his work. However, it's only in the last four years that he's been imprisoned and that Apple Daily, his newspaper, has been shut down, the printing presses silenced. That's because what he has faced since 2020 is prosecutorial harassment, a barrage of spurious cases designed to silence him, weaponizing the law. Make no mistake; this is lawfare.
Now that's something that Jonathan and I, in our work, increasingly see authoritarian states doing. Instead of states just using traditional legal tools—like defamation laws, cyber-libel laws or terrorism laws—to silence their critics, we're now also seeing a wide range of other laws being used to try to silence people, such as regulatory tax fraud laws. Mr. Lai's case is a paradigm example of this authoritarian tactic. He's been convicted in four separate sets of criminal proceedings resulting from peaceful participation in protests and a Tiananmen Square vigil and in a wholly bogus fraud case about violation of a lease.
However, of course, the main and best-known legal weapon he faces is the controversial national security law imposed by Beijing in June 2020. What we're now seeing is the authorities wielding the twin weapons of the NSL and a colonial-era sedition law to try to silence critics. Using those legal weapons, they've ransacked libraries for undesirable books, imprisoned students for liking social media posts, and even convicted authors of children's books about a flock of sheep resisting the tyrannical rule of a wolf pack. This is a dramatic decline of freedoms in a city that has a long and proud history of having enjoyed liberties unavailable in mainland China.
Now Jimmy Lai's NSL and sedition trial lays this bare. Every day in the trial we see new, ludicrous allegations. I'll just give one example in opening: Last week, the prosecution made great play of the fact that Apple Daily, a newspaper, had news coverage almost every day of the umbrella movement. A newspaper reports news; that's the allegation.
In truth, it seems to us that Jimmy Lai is accused of three things: conspiracy to commit journalism, conspiracy to raise human rights concerns with human rights organizations like Hong Kong Watch; and conspiracy to raise political concerns with politicians, including members of IPAC. Frankly, these are not crimes. They are actions protected under international law, echoing the protections here in Canada in section 2 of the charter. They're also actions that should remain protected under the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
The second theme I want to highlight is transnational repression. That's the deeply concerning pattern of the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities no longer being content with doing what they can to silence critics within their own borders, but trying to use the long arm of the state to silence their critics wherever in the world they may be. That's, of course, done through a range of threats and actions, including secret overseas police stations and bounties being put on the heads of individuals worldwide. John Lee described them as “street rats” who should be hunted down. I'm acutely conscious that, in 2021, the PRC imposed sanctions upon Canadian politicians, including this subcommittee, for daring to speak out about human rights abuses.
We're now seeing extraterritorial threats to prosecute those who support Jimmy Lai, including Sébastien Lai, a son speaking out for his father, and we on the international legal team for daring to raise concerns about human rights abuses before United Nations bodies. We've also seen a range of individuals outrageously named as alleged co-conspirators in the trial, including Luke de Pulford, who sits beside me, and Bill Browder. The message to all of us is clear: We should leave Jimmy Lai to his fate. However, we will not be bullied, and we know that this subcommittee will not be bullied either.
The third theme I want to turn to quickly is why Hong Kong is different from other authoritarian regimes. We hear about those issues I've raised so far in other countries, like Iran, Myanmar, Belarus and Russia. The difference with Hong Kong is that it continues to maintain a fig leaf of rule of law, a facade of due process and business as usual.
We've all seen the videos of Hong Kongers weeping in the rain as they kept vigil outside Apple Daily's offices on the last night of its printing, shining smartphone lights as makeshift candles in a poignant image which was then captured on the final cover. We all saw Hong Kongers queueing around the block to buy that final copy of Apple Daily, realizing that the last newspaper that spoke truth to CCP power was dying, and with it, a part of Hong Kong.
Now, what we see in Hong Kong is a bay of broken promises. It's the only financial capital to hold hundreds of political prisoners. As Congressman Mike Gallagher in the U.S. put it so powerfully, the bankers wear golden blindfolds as they look out to Victoria Harbour.
Frankly, it's not only the bankers. All those who believe Hong Kong still complies with the rule of law must look more closely and look at what is happening to Jimmy Lai.