Everybody in public life should know the old adage: “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” However, many Western politicians routinely disregard it. An example arose on March 26, when the British foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, issued the United Kingdom’s 58th six-monthly report on the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
In comparison with the six-monthly reports of her predecessors, including David Lammy, David Cameron, and Dominic Raab, Cooper’s criticisms were relatively brief (albeit equally mechanical). However, the brazen hypocrisy that stained the earlier reports was evident once more.
For example, Cooper accused Hong Kong of trying “to silence criticism overseas” by using arrest warrants and bounties, which was “wholly unacceptable”. By this, she meant it was exercising its extra-territorial jurisdiction to defend itself from foreign-based fanatics trying to wreck the “one country, two systems” policy and undermine China — some of whom, in violation of the comity of nations, have been granted safe haven in the UK, where they operate with impunity.
However, Cooper failed to mention that the national security laws of various other common law jurisdictions, including her own, Australia, Canada and the United States, also have extraterritorial effect (under principles such as the “personality principle” and the “protective principle”).
Indeed, the extraterritorial provisions of Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) of 2024 owe much to those in the UK’s National Security Act of 2023, which its drafters carefully studied. Therefore, instead of criticizing Hong Kong for trying to protect itself from hostile forces, she should have applauded it for following the British model. Unfortunately, her report is all about cheap shots rather than objective commentary.
As usual, Cooper trotted out the discredited myth that the Hong Kong SAR National Security Law (NSL) was being applied willy-nilly. Although the evidence shows the NSL has always been applied with great restraint, she claimed it “continued to expand in scope and practice”. She clearly had no interest in the official statistics, unveiled by the Hong Kong Police Force on Feb 11. They demonstrated that since the NSL and the SNSO came into force in, respectively, 2020 and 2024, there were only 385 arrests by the end of 2025, and not all the arrestees were subsequently charged, which is what counts.
As of March 1, only 206 individuals and five companies had been prosecuted for national security offenses since 2020. On any objective analysis, these figures are tiny, particularly given the ongoing efforts to destabilize Hong Kong and wreck the “one country, two systems” framework. Although Hong Kong has a population of approximately 7.5 million, only a handful of fanatics have been prosecuted, with the overwhelming majority of people being law-abiding.
Although reassuring, these statistics do not appear in Cooper’s report, which, on its face, is surprising. After all, the UK consul general in Hong Kong, Brian Davidson, presumably provided them, and would not have expected them to be airbrushed out. However, they have no propaganda value, and the view apparently prevailed in London that they are best ignored. Anybody, therefore, who wants to understand the actual state of affairs in Hong Kong will need to look elsewhere.
Notwithstanding the minuscule arrest numbers, Cooper sought to sensationalize what she said were the 69 national security-related arrests made last year, including for “displaying political slogans, peaceful protest and organizing petitions”. If this were all there was to the arrests, the cases would not have progressed any further.
In Hong Kong, as in the UK, a suspect can only be prosecuted if there is solid evidence of a crime. A suspect must have committed a guilty act and also have a guilty mind. Any cases taken to court on the basis posited by Cooper would be dead in the water (as the foreign office’s legal department could have explained to her, had she been interested).
Indeed, nobody should be fooled by her attempts to demean a city whose legal system was ranked among the world’s best by the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2025 (rated 24th out of the 143 jurisdictions surveyed, behind the UK but ahead of the US). Although this was no mean feat, particularly after the turmoil of 2019-20, Cooper gave the city no praise, undoubtedly because it contradicted her critique.
However, this is only half the story, and hypocrisy looms large. Until Sept 5, Cooper was the British home secretary, responsible for policing and law and order. As such, she took the shameful decision (July 5) to proscribe Palestine Action (PA) by listing it under the Terrorism Act 2000. PA enjoys wide support in the UK, and campaigns for a Palestinian state, an end to the Gaza genocide, and respect for the human rights of the Palestinians. This made it a target of governmental repression.
In consequence of Cooper’s ban, the police arrested over 2,700 people in 2025 for peacefully expressing opposition to the banning of PA in the UK. The arrests were on a scale not seen since the poll tax riots in the 1990s, and nobody with a conscience was safe. Those arrested included people of all ages with exemplary pedigrees, united by the belief that it was intolerable to sit on the sidelines as their fellow human beings suffered in Palestine. Their “crime” was to brandish placards displaying slogans like “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
Although Cooper grandly announced her government would be unwavering in its support of Hong Kong's "rights, freedoms", she would be well advised to focus instead on upholding the rights and freedoms of the British people, which she has trampled underfoot
Rather than telling the Metropolitan Police to concentrate on combating London’s notorious crime rates (including street crime, now at record levels), Cooper preferred to unleash them on men and women of conscience peacefully expressing their views.
Among the many voices who denounced her government’s repression was Amnesty International, which “condemned the use of counterterrorism laws to target peaceful protesters”. Even Cooper’s former Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, described her proscription of PA as “an absurd and authoritarian attack on the right to protest”. Unfortunately, it was all water off a duck’s back, and she refused to listen to anybody pointing out her clampdown was “un-British”.
It came, therefore, as no great surprise when Cooper’s ban on PA was declared to be illegal by the High Court in February, primarily because it was not shown to be a terrorist organization. Although there is to be an appeal, the Metropolitan Police initially had the good sense to stop arresting peaceful protesters. However, this changed on March 27 (presumably after governmental pressure), when they announced they would resume their arrests of people for supporting PA (18 were detained in London on Saturday). If this smacked of contempt for the rule of law and a disregard of the legal norms for which Britain was once famed, it was because it was both of those things.
As the minister who engineered a scandal that traumatized thousands of her fellow citizens, divided the country, and threatened the rule of law, Cooper should be hanging her head in shame — not berating the Hong Kong authorities for supposedly arresting a paltry 69 individuals in 2025.
Yet despite her ferocious clampdown on protesters’ rights, Cooper accused the Hong Kong authorities of presiding over a continuing “erosion of rights and freedoms”. By any yardstick, this was delusional.
Indeed, in its annual human rights report last August, the US Department of State accused the UK of backsliding on human rights, citing “serious restrictions” on free speech. When even Britain’s closest ally felt obliged to call out its human rights record, there must be something seriously wrong. It beggars belief, therefore, that Cooper had the gall to point fingers at Hong Kong after her own government’s human rights record had been so roundly condemned by Washington.
Although Cooper grandly announced her government would be unwavering in its support of Hong Kong’s “rights, freedoms”, she would be well advised to focus instead on upholding the rights and freedoms of the British people, which she has trampled underfoot.
If, moreover, Cooper is really concerned about unjustified arrests, she need look no further than the arrests (and subsequent charging) of two British nationals, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, accused of spying for China. After an ordeal that saw their reputations trashed, their employment ended, and their health impaired, the case against them collapsed in September for lack of basic evidence (about China constituting a national security threat). It remains to be seen if the two men will sue Cooper (or the Home Office) for malicious prosecution, but on the face of it, they must have a strong case.
As if all this were not bad enough, Cooper also regurgitated tired old fallacies about the Apple Daily founder, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, who was recently sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for endangering national security. Using words drafted years ago by her predecessors, she said, “The UK condemns the politically motivated prosecution in the NSL trial of British national Jimmy Lai,” which was bizarre.
If there had indeed been any evidence that Lai’s prosecution was politically motivated (or otherwise based on improper grounds), his high-powered legal team would have sought a stay of the proceedings as an abuse of the court’s process. However, no such application was made, for good reason — Cooper’s claim was unsupported by so much as a scintilla of evidence.
It is unclear whether Cooper cleared her report with the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, before publication. If she did, it suggests he may not be as keen as he professes to be about improving relations with Beijing. If she did not, it suggests she may not see eye to eye with Starmer, and is more interested in ingratiating herself with the UK’s vocal anti-China lobby than in promoting better ties. Wherever the truth lies, hypocritical allegations are not the stuff of better Anglo-Chinese relations and have no role in constructive diplomacy. The sooner they become a relic of a wasted past, the better it will be for everyone who believes in mature, mutually beneficial exchanges between the two countries.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
