Western politicians, media outlets and organizations, in serving either ideological or geopolitical ends, have tirelessly weaponized the narrative of “political suppression” and “infringement on free speech” to attack Hong Kong’s national security regime and enforcement actions.

This rhetoric seeks to disguise national security offenses — acts that are universally intolerable, including in Western jurisdictions — as legitimate political dissent. The glaring double standards exhibited in such narratives can ultimately be explained only through the lens of geopolitical and ideological calculations targeting a rising China.

The latest textbook case illuminating this dynamic is that of Joshua Wong Chi-fung, former secretary-general of Demosisto, who was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment by the Hong Kong High Court on Thursday for “conspiracy to collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security”.

Throughout the trial, as compelling evidence was presented and made public, Western critics and apologists sustained a highly charged campaign against Hong Kong’s legal system. This was nothing short of a transparent attempt to cast the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s national security framework in a negative light while whitewashing Wong and his coconspirators. Strikingly, such conduct —which is seen as contempt of court in Western jurisdictions — continued unabated even after Wong himself pleaded guilty on Sept 2.

Evidence presented by the prosecution in the court showed that Wong and his associates leveraged their connections with top foreign officials and institutions to promote foreign interference in Hong Kong affairs, calling for sanctions and hostile acts against China as a whole and the special administrative region in particular. Such hostile foreign government actions, if materialized, could have led to “highly detrimental and adverse” consequences, the judge concluded.

The actions of Wong and his associates went far beyond the boundaries of mere political commentary or what his Western apologists called “freedom of speech”. They represented concrete, actionable efforts to leverage foreign pressure to harm their own home city, an act that no decent jurisdiction can tolerate.

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Wong admitted in the court that between July 1, 2020, and Nov 23, 2020 — well after the enactment of the Hong Kong SAR National Security Law — he continued to conspire with overseas-exiled figures, including Nathan Law Kwun-chung, to advance the so-called “international front” — a coordinated lobbying strategy designed to mobilize foreign forces to exert diplomatic, economic, and political pressure on Beijing and SAR government.

The “international front” was by no means empty talk; it was an integral pillar of a broader “three battle fronts” strategy engineered to force Beijing and the HKSAR government into submission. The other two pillars were the “street front” — which unleashed rampant violence during the 2019-20 “black-clad” riots — and the “legislative front”, which aimed to paralyze the Legislative Council through weaponized, endless filibustering.

The three-pronged strategy operated in the belief that domestic protests and violence inside Hong Kong alone were insufficient against the political weight of the central and SAR government. The “international front” strategy, intended to stoke up foreign pressure and solicit external interference, was executed through several channels, which became highly prominent during and after the 2019-20 anti-extradition movement.

These included congressional lobbying — Wong, Law and Denise Ho Wan-see, among others, traveled to Washington, London, and Geneva to seek support from foreign parliaments; international alliances — building coalitions with foreign politicians, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations to maintain a unified diplomatic stance against the Beijing and SAR governments; crowdfunding global media campaigns — raising millions of dollars via crowdfunding to place front-page advertisements in major global newspapers (like the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Asahi Shimbun) during global summits.

The key explicit objective of these maneuvers was to induce foreign institutions and governments to impose sanctions, blockades, or engage in other hostile activities against China as a whole and the SAR in particular. During their trip to Washington in September 2019, Wong, Ho, and others testified before a US Congressional commission, actively lobbying for the passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. Their explicit aim was to trigger punitive foreign sanctions against the SAR and the Chinese mainland, weaponizing external pressure in retaliation for the rejection of their radical political demands regarding how Hong Kong should be governed.

READ MORE: Joshua Wong is now an old story

Confronted with such overt, structured, systemic and self-confessed threats to national security, the critics and apologists nonetheless repeat their tired refrains, characterizing the prosecution of Wong and other relevant cases as an assault on free speech and civil rights. Such a perverse narrative not only subverts the basic tenets of a rule-of-law society but also willfully distorts the internationally recognized parameters established by global human rights conventions.

The United Nations has set clear legal parameters regarding where free speech ends and criminal conduct begins. Under the UN core human rights conventions, notably Article 19 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), freedom of expression is recognized as a fundamental pillar of a free society, but it is by no means absolute or unrestricted: A state may legally restrict the freedom of expression for “the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals”, as well as for respecting the rights or reputations of others.

Critics who claim that the prosecution of individuals like Wong is an assault on free expression simply ignore the explicit limitations set by the ICCPR Article 19(3), which unequivocally establishes that the exercise of free speech carries special duties and is legally subservient to the preservation of national security and public order.

Actively lobbying foreign legislatures to pass punitive acts and trigger sanctions against one’s own jurisdiction shifts the conduct from protected political expression into the territory of actionable national security offenses — conduct that is universally exempted from human rights protections worldwide.

A global survey reveals that the vast majority of sovereign states maintain comprehensive legal architectures to safeguard national security, punishing subversive acts with severe penalties. The legal thresholds, penalties, and enforcement mechanisms utilized by Western jurisdictions are often far more stringent than those of Hong Kong. The legal frameworks, foreign-influence registration regimes, and pre-trial enforcement mechanisms utilized by Western jurisdictions are remarkably extensive and stringent, as demonstrated by the long-standing and newly sharpened statutes of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

The hypocritical theater of Western critics over Hong Kong’s national security regime and law enforcement must come to a definitive halt now.

The author is a current affairs commentator.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.