More on UK NatSec trial

The national security trial of Bill Yuen and Peter Wai in the UK gets underway…

The two men, who hold dual British and Chinese nationality, are accused of agreeing to undertake information gathering, surveillance and acts of deception likely to materially assist a foreign intelligence service between December 2023 and May 2024. 

…Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC said the defendants received requests from people connected to the Hong Kong Police and Hong Kong authorities to gather intelligence about overseas Hongkongers for whom the territory’s government had issued bounties.

Messages between the defendants show one of the surveillance targets was prominent pro-democracy activist Nathan Law, the court heard.

…The Old Bailey case concerned the defendants and their associates “taking the law into their own hands and acting as if the UK law was of no relevance”, Atkinson added.

…Atkinson said Wai and Trickett were paid for their activity directly by the Hong Kong economic and trade office.

…He told the court that the gathering of such intelligence appeared to have coincided with measures by Hong Kong police to extend their reach beyond the jurisdiction of the territory.

From HKFP…

“The defendants engaged in shadow policing operations on behalf of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and thereby the People’s Republic of China,” prosecutor Duncan Atkinson told the jury.

They gathered information about “persons of interest” to Hong Kong and undertook surveillance, as if they were entitled to “when no such entitlement existed”, he added.

Some comments from the HK Democracy Council…

Wai also posted information about HK protestors in a WhatsApp group called Eagle Point Human Resources Company. He discussed w/ former HK cop Eddie Ma “infiltrating” a group called “Hongkongers in the UK.” Ma referred to HKers in the UK as “cockroaches.”

…In all, evidence was presented that Yuen & Wai were tasked w/ surveilling at least 4 HKers for whom the HK natsec police issued natsec arrest warrants & bounties: Nathan Law, Christopher Mung, Finn Lau & Tony Choi. [Also mentioned: Frankie Leung, Lee Wing-tat and YouTuber Tony Choi.]

…A big question: who were the 2 former HK cops working for? [Former HK cop] George Lee was for an unspecified period “seconded to the Security Bureau of HKSAR as Government Security Officer.” Was the HK Security Bureau behind this espionage operation?

The prosecution’s case sounds… quite spicy.

Nikkei Asia (paywalled) takes a stroll around the HK Museum of History. Sounds like a must-see attraction for tourists…

A tour of it now begins in what is known as the National Security Exhibition Gallery, where groups of schoolchildren on field trips are taken through its halls. The exhibit was created to commemorate, explain and — crucially — celebrate the NSL on the fifth anniversary of its imposition. Beijing’s goal in imposing the NSL was to ensure that the 2019 protest wave would be the last of its kind. The move was, therefore, in some senses a final conquest of Hong Kong, and the exhibit is evidence of the completion of this process.

…The exhibit dominates a museum that, before 2020, celebrated Hong Kong’s distinctive past and vibrant civil life. It even had the People’s Republic of China’s only museum allusion to the 1989 Tiananmen protests, through reference to local support for that struggle. In the current main exhibit, though, the focus is on a unified national history. The halls are full of artifacts — from national flags to objects from the past — presented as proving that Hong Kong was always meant to be and is now firmly integrated into China. The allusion to Tiananmen is gone, and the 2019 protests are denigrated, their suppression extolled as restoring order to a city that an allegedly foreign-backed “color revolution” had nearly destroyed.

The exhibit features film footage of street clashes, selectively showing crowd violence, never the police violence that was much more extensive. It goes into painstaking detail regarding the supposed necessity of the legislation and the new structures created to enforce it. There are instructions on plaques advising visitors to be vigilant and report suspicious activity to appropriate bodies — a bald self-advertisement of a surveillance state.