Trial of Jimmy Lai

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs what steps he is taking to support Jimmy Lai during his trial and if he will call for his immediate and unconditional release.

The Foreign Secretary has called on the Hong Kong authorities to end their prosecution of Jimmy Lai and release him. He also urged the Chinese authorities to repeal the national security law and end the prosecution of all individuals charged under it. The Foreign Secretary and I welcomed the opportunity to meet Mr Lai’s son, Sebastien, again last week and to listen to his concerns as the trial approached.

As the Foreign Secretary has made clear, Mr Lai’s prosecution is politically motivated. He has faced multiple charges to discredit and silence him. As an outspoken journalist and publisher, he has been targeted in a clear attempt to stop the peaceful exercise of his rights to freedom of expression and association. The Foreign Secretary raised Mr Lai’s prosecution with Foreign Minister Wang Yi on 5 December, as his predecessor did in Beijing on 30 August. We will continue to press for Mr Lai’s release with the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities.

Diplomats from our consulate general attended court today as a visible sign of the UK’s support, and they will continue to do so. We will continue to press for consular access to Mr Lai, which the Hong Kong prison authorities have repeatedly refused. China considers anyone of Chinese heritage born in China to be a Chinese national. It does not recognise other nationalities and therefore considers Mr Lai to be exclusively Chinese.

More broadly, we have made it clear that the national security law has damaged Hong Kong and its way of life. Rights and freedoms have been significantly eroded and arrests under the law have silenced opposition voices. It is a clear breach of the Sino-British joint declaration, the legally binding UN-registered treaty that China willingly entered into. Its continued existence and use is a demonstration of China breaking its international commitments. We will continue to stand up for the people of Hong Kong, to call out violations of their rights and freedoms, and to hold China to its international obligations.

I thank my right hon. Friend for her response.

Jimmy Lai is and has always been a full British citizen and he has never held a Chinese passport, and therefore he should have been publicly recognised by the Government some time ago. However, I welcome the change in rhetoric by the Foreign Secretary, who said today that

“Jimmy Lai is a British citizen”

and called on the Chinese Government to release him. I am pleased that there seems to have been a shift in policy. Notwithstanding that, I and hon. Friends have raised the issue of his citizenship with the Foreign Office to no avail, until now.

At the heart of the issue lies the Sino-British agreement. I recall that at the time of its signing, the ambassador in Beijing, Percy Cradock, said of China’s leaders that they may be “thuggish dictators” but that they were “men of their word” and could be

“trusted to do what they promise”.

How history always shows us wrong. We cannot trust thuggish dictators, and they have trashed the Sino-British agreement without so much as a by-your-leave. Instead, we now have political persecution, destruction of press freedoms, forced confessions and the targeting of foreign nationals as a matter of course. The national security law is the key, because it has been stripping away their rights, and particularly those of Jimmy Lai, who faces a lifetime in prison.

A new axis of totalitarian states has formed, including China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Syria. We must be on our toes and realise that their target is democracy itself. Given that, will the Government reconsider their words in the integrated review and reinstate the idea that China is a systemic threat, not just to us but to the very values that we seek?

Order. I am sorry, but the right hon. Gentleman is way, way over time. I am sure that other hon. Members will bring in the other points.

I think we all agree with my right hon. Friend that the breaching of the Sino-British joint declaration is a great tragedy. As the Foreign Secretary set out, the national security law, which we are calling on the Hong Kong authorities to repeal, is breaching so many of those values that we understood that China was willing to maintain with Hong Kong after 1997.

My right hon. Friend mentions the integrated review refresh, in which the Prime Minister set out very clearly our perspective, which is that we consider China to be an epoch-defining challenge. It then sets out in great detail a number of areas of concern around China and economic coercive activity. We continue to work closely with the G7 and other partners around the world to tackle that and to work together to try to persuade China to reverse some of those policies.

Importantly—I say this a lot at the Dispatch Box as the sanctions Minister—I listen very closely, as do all of us here and our officials in the Foreign Office, on all issues related to potential future sanctions. We continue to look at those under the global human rights sanctions regulations in this arena, but we do not speculate about future sanctions designations, because of course that could reduce their impact.

I call the shadow Minister.

The ongoing detention of Jimmy Lai, a British citizen, is a stark symbol of the decline of Hong Kong’s freedoms and China’s flagrant disregard for the legally binding Sino-British agreement, which promised a high degree of autonomy for Hongkongers for 50 years. Jimmy Lai’s trial is a further chapter in the erosion of the liberties promised then to the people of Hong Kong.

My right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary and I have met Jimmy’s son, Sebastien, regularly and made unequivocally clear Labour’s position that Jimmy must be released immediately and that the national security law under which he is being charged is abhorrent. I welcome the intervention by the new Foreign Secretary as Mr Lai’s trial begins today, but there must be sustained interest by the Government, in a way that has been sorely lacking until now.

We cannot sit idly by while British citizens experience a politically motivated trial and the authorities attempt to stifle freedom of expression. I urge the Minister to give a firm commitment right here that the Foreign Secretary’s intervention will not be a one-off, and that the Government will follow Labour’s lead in sustained, consistent and full-throated support for Mr Lai and his legal counsel, and in putting the freedoms promised to the people of Hong Kong at the top of her agenda.

As the Minister both for the Indo-Pacific region—China and Hong Kong are in my purview—and for sanctions, the issues of Jimmy Lai and others held in this way are very much at the top of my agenda. They always have been and always will remain so.

I have met Sebastien Lai on a number of occasions this year, and have worked closely with him and his team to understand the situation and to look at the support that we can provide. The frustration is that we are not able to provide consular access, because we are not allowed to visit him in prison. The Foreign Secretary set out yesterday that he has called for Jimmy Lai’s release, and we will continue to sustain that throughout the trial. At the moment, we expect the trial to last some 80 days, so we expect to see it wrap up in the summer. We will be working very closely with like-minded partners—US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, European and Swiss representatives were also in court today—to make it clear that we all have one view, which is that this is a trial from which Jimmy Lai needs to be released.

I am interested in the question of Mr Lai’s nationality status. If he is a full British citizen, will my right hon. Friend confirm whether Hong Kong has unilaterally withdrawn consular rights for foreign missions to visit their citizens in prison, or is that specifically the case for those imprisoned under the national security law? Whichever it is, could she confirm that the Foreign Office has done everything possible to ensure that the Hong Kong Government realise that those rights of access for our citizens should not be violated lightly?

My hon. Friend is right that consular access should, in an ideal world, be provided to all those who find themselves in prison, whatever the country. The frustrating fact is that it is up to a country—not specifically China—whether it considers dual nationality acceptable. Obviously, we will consider such a dual national British; they will have a British passport. We have absolutely done everything, and we continue to ask for consular access for Jimmy Lai. I was able to help him get a new passport earlier in the year because his old one had run out; we worked with the Home Office to ensure that. We are very comfortable and certain that he is indeed a British citizen, but as I set out, the Hong Kong authorities consider a Hong Kong national born in mainland China to be a Chinese citizen—hence their view on dual nationality, and the impossibility of our authorities visiting him in prison at the moment.

I call the SNP spokesperson.

I thank the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for securing this urgent question, and Lord Alton, Baroness Kennedy and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for their continuing and unwavering support for Jimmy Lai, who, as a UK national, is entitled to expect much more support from the Government than he has thus far received.

A 76-year-old pro-democracy campaigner in ailing health has been imprisoned for more than 1,000 days on trumped-up charges, yet it was only yesterday that his Government finally called for him to be released. I hope that I have misunderstood the Minister, but are we to believe that the UK’s influence is so diminished that we cannot get access to Mr Lai in prison? Will she detail what practical support is being given to him now that his show trial has started, and will she give a cast-iron guarantee that, in the event that Beijing gets the verdict that it is looking for, the Government will proactively come to this House to make a statement on what action they intend to take, rather than having it dragged out of them through another urgent question?

I will not reiterate my previous answer on the subject of consular access and the challenges that we face in being able to support Jimmy Lai in that way. I reiterate the hon. Member’s point that many colleagues across the House have been ardent champions and supporters of Jimmy Lai, and indeed of his family as they seek to ensure that his case is understood across the world. We will continue to call for Jimmy Lai’s release. The national security law needs to be repealed. Those are messages that we will continue to highlight with the authorities at every possible opportunity.

Can I thank you personally, Mr Speaker, for granting today’s urgent question? The pantomime trial of Jimmy Lai is just the tip of a huge iceberg of the Chinese Communist party’s industrial-scale abuse of human rights and indifference to the international rule of law. Today, Parliaments around the world are expressing their solidarity with Jimmy Lai and the oppressed, freedom-loving people of Hong Kong, but there must be consequences. It is no good just monitoring human rights sanctions across the globe; my right hon. Friend has had years to name some of the legal and other officials of the Chinese Government who are undermining and abusing human rights as we speak. When will we see action, and what is she doing to address the concerns about the continual erosion of the judicial process in Hong Kong, and the involvement there of British judges? We need action, not constant warm words.

We continue to use sanctions tools across the piece at every opportunity where the evidence comes to us and we can use it, bearing in mind that, as we always say—I am sorry that it is frustrating for colleagues—we will never discuss potential future sanctions designations, because it could reduce their impact. We will always listen to and look closely at the evidence brought to us, and indeed at the work that our teams across the world do, to try to bring to bear our sanctions regimes against the human rights violations that we are seeing.

Sadly, as we predicted, the people of Hong Kong have seen their freedoms systematically eroded since the national security law was introduced in 2020. Pro-democracy activists such as Jimmy Lai have been detained, public libraries have been emptied of books seen as promoting so-called bad ideologies and the recent “patriots only” local elections saw opposition candidates banned from standing. Can the Minister please explain how the UK Government plan to uphold their commitment to human rights and freedom for all Hongkongers?

The hon. Lady is right; it has been tragic to see the disintegration of all those freedoms, which, when both countries signed up to the Sino-British joint declaration, we considered that China would stand by. Of course, when we saw the national security law coming in, we responded very quickly and decisively, in particular with the new immigration path for British national overseas passport holders, so that we could provide that security for those who felt under most stress. We also suspended the extradition treaty with Hong Kong indefinitely to provide protection for those people and we have extended our arms embargo on mainland China to cover Hong Kong. This is a tragic situation, and we will continue to call for change and for the Hong Kong authorities to reverse the national security law and restore those freedoms that were part of Hong Kong’s extraordinary opportunity for economic success, as well as other things.

Given everything that is happening in China, including this pitiful show trial, is it not now time that the Government of this country developed a proper, coherent cross-Government strategy for dealing with China, since they are patently lacking one at the moment?