A Hong Kong court has dismissed a jailed protester’s bid for early release in the first legal challenge to the Chinese territory’s recently enacted national security law.
Ma Chun-man was sentenced to five years in prison for “inciting secession” under a Beijing-decreed national security law introduced in 2020.
Ma would normally have been eligible for a one-third reduction in his sentence for good behaviour but a second national security law passed by Hong Kong’s legislature earlier this year raised the bar for remission in national security cases.
The new law stipulates that people found guilty of national security crimes should not be granted remission unless the commissioner of correctional services is confident that doing so would not endanger national security.
Ma sought a judicial review of correctional authorities’ denial of his request for early release, arguing he was not properly informed about the decision.
In a decision on Friday, high court judge Alex Lee dismissed Ma’s challenge, finding that the new rules for remission were “sufficiently precise and certain” and that the decision-making process was “not procedurally unfair”.
“There is no question of Mr Ma being subject to any additional or heavier penalty by operation,” Lee, one of a number of judges hand-picked by the city’s leader to hear national security cases, said in his decision.
As of June, 300 people had been arrested for security-related offences since the introduction of the national security laws, with more than half of them charged, according to police statistics.
Western governments and human rights groups have criticised the laws for curtailing rights and freedoms that were supposed to be guaranteed as part of the terms of the former British colony’s return to Chinese rule.
Beijing and Hong Kong officials have defended the laws as necessary to restore stability to the city after antigovernment protests that often turned violent.
