The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office published on Thursday its so-called 59th six-monthly report on Hong Kong, covering January to June 2026. Within a day, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government issued a forceful rebuttal, condemning the report’s “untrue remarks, slander and smears” and urging London to “immediately stop its long-arm jurisdiction and interference in Hong Kong affairs, which are purely China’s internal matters”.

The exchange is familiar. What deserves closer scrutiny is not the repetition of the ritual, but the structural flaws that make this report less an assessment of Hong Kong than a political document in search of a conclusion.

It is abundantly clear that this is a misrepresentation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and a faked jurisdiction invented by the UK over post-handover Hong Kong.

The HKSAR government’s response is unambiguous: The core intention of the Joint Declaration is for China to resume the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong; it confers on Britain “no sovereignty, no governance rights, and no supervisory rights” over the region after July 1, 1997.

The Chinese Embassy in London made the same point: The UK “has continued to churn out the so-called report”, using the Joint Declaration “as a pretext to make unwarranted comments on Hong Kong affairs and interfere in China’s internal affairs”.

This is not a semantic dispute. A Joint Declaration that records the transfer of jurisdictional power can never be read as creating a permanent external supervisory role over the returned land. To insist otherwise is to convert a historical document into an instrument of ongoing political leverage. The UK report may record Britain’s “understanding” of the Joint Declaration, but London has no standing to issue a verdict on how Hong Kong governs itself.

Obviously, this is a double standard dressed as principle. The UK report’s treatment of national security law is where its inconsistencies become most visible. It criticizes Hong Kong’s legal framework and enforcement while ignoring Britain’s own increasingly expansive security apparatus.

According to the HKSAR government, the UK had, by June, arrested nearly 4,000 people under national security and counterterrorism laws — a 15-fold increase over the previous year and 15 times the 10-year median. In September alone, more than 50 people were arrested for peacefully holding homemade banners or carrying items expressing support for a banned organization; among them was a 94-year-old barrister.

The point is not that Britain should be indifferent to security threats. It is that a state with at least 14 national security statutes, which has rushed a new national security bill through parliament in a month, is poorly placed to lecture Hong Kong about security laws.

When the same conduct is described as “prudent protection” at home and “repressive” abroad, the UK’s vocabulary of human rights becomes an instrument of policy rather than a standard of judgment.

The UK report’s handling of the Jimmy Lai Chee-ying case follows the same pattern. It presents him as a press-freedom cause celebre. Yet the 855-page conviction judgment, available to the public, sets out findings that Lai was the “mastermind and promoter” of activities aimed at soliciting foreign sanctions and hostile action against China as a whole and the HKSAR in particular.

One may disagree with a law, but not with the proposition that courts should apply it to evidence rather than to the political preferences of foreign capitals.

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The UK report cannot wish away the facts. If the report’s allegations were sound, they should be corroborated by how the world actually treats Hong Kong. They are not. In the 40th Global Financial Centres Index, released in September by the British think tank Z/Yen and the China Development Institute in Shenzhen, Hong Kong ranked third globally and first in Asia-Pacific.

In the first half of 2026, Hong Kong’s initial public offering market ranked second globally, raising approximately HK$203.3 billion ($25.92 billion). In the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2026, Hong Kong rose to second globally, its highest position since 2019, with government efficiency ranked second worldwide.

The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World 2026 report once again ranked Hong Kong the freest economy among 165 jurisdictions. On the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2026, Hong Kong’s overall ranking remains high and continues to outpace several Western jurisdictions that routinely criticize the city’s legal system.

These are not the HKSAR government’s claims. They are the findings of international surveys, including one produced by a British institution. The UK report itself, moreover, acknowledges facts that sit awkwardly with its narrative: The common law system continues in Hong Kong, the Court of Final Appeal retains final adjudication, and overseas common law judges continue to sit on it.

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It records that the Court of Appeal quashed a separate fraud conviction of Lai and the Department of Justice did not pursue the matter further. If the judicial system were an instrument of political control as critics accuse, such outcomes would not have occurred, and a report interested in a balanced picture would have said so plainly.

Justice must be seen to be done by the public. The UK should immediately cease applying double standards to, and making defamatory statements and remarks against, Hong Kong.

The author is a law professor, director of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies, and president of the Association for the Promotion of Rule of Law, Education and Technologies.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.