The Hong Kong government gazetted sweeping amendments to its national security law’s implementation rules on Monday, introducing for the first time a criminal offense for refusing to hand over mobile phone or computer passwords to police during national security investigations, a measure that legal scholars and rights organizations condemned as an unprecedented erosion of the right to a fair trial and the privacy of communication in a city whose civil liberties have been systematically curtailed since Beijing imposed the national security law in 2020.
The new rules require people under investigation for endangering national security, as well as anyone who owns, possesses, or is authorized to access the electronic device in question, or who simply knows the password, to provide “any password or other decryption method” necessary to allow police access to the equipment.
Previously, refusal to unlock a phone or other device during a national security investigation did not constitute obstruction under Hong Kong law. Under the amended rules, refusal carries up to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of HK$100,000, approximately $12,780. Providing false or misleading information carries up to three years in prison and a fine of HK$500,000.
The amendments were drawn up by Chief Executive John Lee in conjunction with the National Security Commission and gazetted without passage through the Legislative Council, a bypass mechanism available to the government under the NSL’s implementation framework that allows rules to take immediate effect without legislative debate.
The amendments are the second changes to the implementation rules since the law’s introduction in June 2020, following a technical amendment in 2023. A government spokesperson described them as essential given what officials characterized as the current complex and volatile geopolitical situation, saying “national security risks faced by Hong Kong may arise suddenly and unexpectedly” and that authorities must “at all times maintain a high degree of vigilance.”
The amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items they deem to carry “seditious intention,” regardless of whether any person has been formally arrested for a national security offense in connection with those items, extending enforcement authority beyond active investigations to any customs encounter in which an officer forms a subjective assessment of seditious content.
The amendments introduce a new mechanism allowing individuals designated as foreign agents to apply to the court to revoke or alter a data demand — a provision developed in direct response to a Court of Final Appeal ruling last year that quashed the convictions of three Tiananmen vigil activists who had refused to comply with a police demand for the Hong Kong Alliance’s records.
The top court ruled that authorities had failed to prove the Alliance was a foreign agent and that the trio had been denied a fair trial due to heavily redacted evidence. The new mechanism preserves compelled disclosure while creating a limited judicial review pathway, a structural response to the ruling that critics said addressed its procedural defect without restoring the substantive protection it had established.
Urania Chiu, a law lecturer based in the United Kingdom who researches Hong Kong, offered the most direct expert assessment of the amendments’ legal implications.
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“The sweeping powers given to law enforcement officers without any need for judicial authorisation are grossly disproportionate to any legitimate aim the bylaw purports to achieve,” she said. She identified two fundamental rights at stake: the privacy of communication, which the European Court of Human Rights and comparable tribunals have consistently held to include the confidentiality of digital communications; and the right against self-incrimination, which is a cornerstone of the right to a fair trial across common law jurisdictions including the legal framework Hong Kong inherited from British administration.
The right against self-incrimination is particularly central to the legal controversy. In most jurisdictions that derive from the common law tradition, individuals cannot be compelled to provide information that incriminates them — a protection that applies with particular force to the contents of private communications.
The Hong Kong government’s position, outlined in Monday’s gazette notice, is that the amendments conform to the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, and “will not affect the lives of the general public or the normal operation of institutions and organisations.” Rights organizations rejected that characterization without exception.
The broader trajectory from which Monday’s amendments emerge is one of continuous legal tightening since the June 2020 imposition of the NSL. A total of 386 people have been arrested for national security offenses since the law’s introduction, with 176 people and four companies convicted. The NSL punishes acts including subversion, secession, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces with sentences ranging from three years to life imprisonment, with some trials permitted to be heard behind closed doors without a jury.
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In February, Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison for collusion with foreign forces and sedition, a verdict that drew immediate condemnation from the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, and Australia as a politically motivated prosecution of a journalist and publisher for his editorial coverage of Chinese governance and the 2019 protests.
In a case that illustrated the law’s reach into family structures as instruments of enforcement, the father of a pro-democracy activist living in exile was jailed in February for attempting to cash out his daughter’s insurance policy, a prosecution brought under a homegrown law that expands on the NSL, after authorities determined the financial transaction benefited a person designated as a security threat.
The legal architecture being constructed in Hong Kong under the NSL has few parallels among common law jurisdictions outside mainland China. While law enforcement agencies in many countries hold statutory authority to demand device access as part of criminal investigations, the NSL’s scope differs fundamentally from conventional criminal law in that it covers a wide range of vaguely defined conduct across the categories of secession, subversion, terrorism, and foreign collusion, with some offenses carrying life imprisonment and with the law extending extraterritorial jurisdiction to offenses committed anywhere in the world by individuals of any nationality.
Officials are scheduled to brief Legislative Council members on Tuesday. No public consultation process accompanied Monday’s amendments, and no timeline for a formal review of the new rules has been announced.