EXCLUSIVE: DOJ deletes NatSec case index
Days after publishing a useful index of National Security cases, the Department of Justice appears to have gotten cold feet, mirroring a sudden mainland u-turn on public judicial transparency
An index of 106 Hong Kong National Security Law (NSL) and sedition judgements has disappeared from a new Department of Justice (DOJ) webpage just days after its publication, with no explanation forthcoming from DOJ.
Originally launched on Thursday, DOJ’s “Annotations” webpage featured a useful and comprehensive index of all NSL- and sedition-related judgements under the NSL regime: 106 in total, including decisions relating to implementation of the law. The explainer – notably available in English only – aimed at improving transparency and international understanding of Hong Kong’s national security environment and serving as, according to DOJ, a “convenient and practical tool for promoting national security education and conducting legal research”. At its launch Thursday, Secretary for Justice, Paul Lam said “This body of case-law helps us understand the requirements of our national security laws and how they are being applied by the courts.”
But just two days later, the website was censored: the entire case index under “Part E: Index of Cases” was quietly removed, and DOJ hasn’t yet responded to questions on its disappearance.
The move mirrors a crackdown on public access to China’s court decisions: as outlined by SCMP just this morning, the mainland has dramatically u-turned on its “sunshine judiciary” path, cutting the number of judgments available online by half on “security and privacy” concerns and, last week, claiming that “‘openness’ isn’t equal to ‘being public’,” as per SCMP.
The Columbia Law Review published research into the case deletion phenomena early in 2023, analysing the public databases of millions of cases to find patterns in deleted cases: authors concluded deletion stemmed from overlapping and often ad hoc concerns, including “the international and domestic images of Chinese courts, institutional relationships within the Chinese Party-State, worries about revealing negative social phenomena, and concerns about copycat crimes”.
The index deletion in Hong Kong could signify tension between Hong Kong’s desire to give the international community transparency on NSL and the central government’s handling of “negative social phenomena”, a battle between face and facts. Admittedly, some of the “facts” of NSL cases need to be taken with a pinch of “100% conviction rate” salt, but the judgements are still essential reading for understanding post-NSL Hong Kong and for getting a fuller picture than international media will often bare. Having these judgements hidden (after DOJ made a big proud show of publishing them, too) could be cause for alarm on our judicial direction.
For anyone interested, I thought the NSL case index would be useful and saved the page when it was published: a rough-and-ready version can be found here. Thanks for reading and happy new year!