Hong Kong officials involved in targeting UK-based pro-democracy activists who had bounties placed on them should be subject to sanctions, opposition and Tory backbenchers have urged the UK government.
A Foreign Office minister responding to concerns raised in parliament was also challenged by one of her Conservative colleagues over her recent meeting with a Chinese official whom the Tory MP Tim Loughton described as “China’s chief dissident snatcher”.
MPs were discussing an urgent question in the House of Commons after Hong Kong police on Monday offered a reward equal to about £100,000 per person for information leading to the arrest of eight activists, including three in the UK: Nathan Law, Finn Lau and Mung Siu-tat.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a minister of state at the Foreign Office who was responding for the government, was asked by Loughton: “Will she now admit that her sitting down with Liu Jianchao, the head of the international liaison department of the Chinese government, the chief dissident snatcher who will have a role in the issuing of these warrants, with her being photographed sitting next to him smiling along with five other honourable members of this house was a bad idea?
“It sends out entirely the wrong messages to the Chinese government, which is why they think they can get away with it.”
Trevelyan, who met Liu in London at a session of the Great Britain China Council leadership forum on 20 June, said she was comfortable sitting down at the event.
“I believe personally it’s important to have conversations with others. In every diplomatic relationship, being frank is only possible if you are in the room together. I was extremely frank with the gentleman in question,” she said.
Liu was reported on Chinese state media to have expressed hope that the UK and China would deepen mutual understanding based on principles including “non-interference in each other’s internal affairs”.
Tory MPs joined with Labour and the Liberal Democrats in pushing for sanctions, the withdrawal of British judges who were still working on Hong Kong’s top court, and for the government to call in China’s ambassador to complain about the bounties.
The Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesperson, Layla Moran, said the UK had yet to impose sanctions on anyone implicated in the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong.
She named the three activists from Hong Kong who had sought refuge in the UK and who had been subject to the bounties, adding: “They sought refuge in the UK because they thought they would be safe. But chillingly, Beijing is trying to do all it can to interfere.”
The danger to them and others was “all too present”, she said, from quarters including the secret “police service stations” at sites across Britain.
Trevelyan said the extradition agreements between China and the UK had been suspended for some time and that the UK would not tolerate any attempts to silence individuals on British soil. The judges concerned were private citizens and had to reach their own decisions, she added.
She also told the Tory MP Jason McCartney that she would meet him and “urgently” look into a report that HMRC was passing on details of new bank accounts opened by Chinese citizens and Hongkongers in the UK to the Chinese government as part of money laundering efforts.
