Hong Kong Department of Justice removed national security cases databases days after publications News
Magnet larry, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Hong Kong Department of Justice removed national security cases databases days after publications

Hong Kong Department of Justice (DOJ) removed the database that contained national security law-related convictions 5 days after its publication, local media Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reported on Tuesday. The report also said that the DOJ did not give a reason for the removal of the database when approached.

In the press release dated December 28, the DOJ claimed that the publication of the “Annotations of the Hong Kong National Security Law and Sedition Offences in the Crimes Ordinance” aimed to promote a better understanding of the national security law (NSL) and the crime of sedition. In the compilation, the DOJ included the Basic Law sourcebook, the statutory laws of NSL and sedition, and the case law in the relevant areas. The Secretary for Justice, Paul Lam, suggested that all judicial decisions in NSL cases be made public in an open and transparent manner. Lam added that the body of case law is helpful to understand the requirements of the NSL and how the courts apply NSL.

However, the HKFP revealed that the index of NSL cases was removed from the compilation on Tuesday. The removal was also captured by the Wayback Machine, operated by the Internet Archive on the same day. However, this removal might not have significant implications for public access to cases through originally available channels. For instance, the landmark case governing the reporting restrictions on NSL cases, Chow Hang Tung v Secretary for Justice, the judgment is still publicly accessible through the official Judiciary website and Hong Kong Legal Information Institutes run by the HKU Faculty of Law.

The removal was allegedly related to the recent policy change in the Chinese judicial system. Local media, Mingpao and Singtao Daily both similarly reported the decline in the number of cases made available on the China Judgments Online web portal. The Chinese Supreme People’s Court started promoting judicial transparency by operating the China Judgments Online web portal in 2013. Mingpao also outlined the concerns of rollbacks in judicial transparency due to the newly established database that is only accessible through the Chinese judiciaries’ intranet. In response, People’s Court Daily, a state-operated media outlet, published an article written by Professor Wang Liming from Renmin University of China Law School, claiming that the new database will not substitute the original public database. The new database is supposed to improve the research efficiency that the original database could not provide.

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