Hong Kong Court Backs Bid to Keep Tycoon Jimmy Lai in Jail

(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong’s highest court ordered Jimmy Lai to remain in jail before his trial on national security charges, in a victory for Chinese authorities.

The Court of Final Appeal unanimously decided Tuesday to keep Lai in custody, while laying out strict standards for him and other defendants to seek bail under national security legislation enacted last year. The top court had already sent the Next Digital Ltd. founder back to jail on Dec. 31 to give judges time to consider the case after the government challenged a lower court’s decision to release him into house arrest.

Lai intends to appeal to a lower court for bail, the Apple Daily newspaper reported, citing his lawyer.

Mark Simon, a long-time aide to Lai, said the legal team was currently studying the “disappointing” judgment. “The terms of his bail are incredibly restrictive,” Simon said in a text message, adding that the push to keep Lai in jail appeared intended to “send a thuggish message to the rest of Hong Kong.”

Chinese authorities had sought Lai’s immediate detention under a security law enacted by the National People’s Congress last year. The People’s Daily newspaper, a mouthpiece for the Chinese central government, had blasted the earlier decision to release Lai, warning that the case could be transferred to the mainland courts.

The decision led by Chief Justice Andrew Cheung reaffirmed that the top court couldn’t determine whether provisions of the security law were unconstitutional. They did, however, rule that the court could adjudicate whether decisions by local courts were consistent with the language in the law protecting human rights.

Security Law

The case “will be quite significant as the court will need to give some general guidance on how courts should approach the interpretation of the NSL, even though it will confine its attention to the issue of granting bail,” Simon Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, said before the ruling.

The outcome will shape how Hong Kong handles the future prosecution of cases under the security law, which imposed punishments of as long as life in prison for subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers. The legislation contains several provisions that rights lawyers say undercut the former British colony’s Common Law legal system, allowing the government to select judges, transfer cases to the mainland and deny bail.

One provision holds that suspects charged under the security law shouldn’t receive bail “unless the judge has sufficient grounds for believing that the criminal suspect or defendant will not continue to commit acts endangering national security.” The government argued that the judges shouldn’t have released Lai, if doing so required special conditions such as house arrest.

On Tuesday, the judges ruled that the lower court judge “erroneously” interpreted the security law and didn’t take into account the law’s “more stringent threshold” for granting bail.

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