Beverley McLachlin listens to a question during a news conference in Ottawa in December 2017.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Former Canadian Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin says she will retire from her seat on Hong Kong’s highest appellate court when her term ends this summer.
Her announcement follows news that two British judges also quit the same court last week. One of them, Jonathan Sumption, wrote a column for the Financial Times newspaper saying Hong Kong is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state.”
Ms. McLachlin had faced repeated calls to resign since China’s 2020 imposition of a national-security law eroded the legal freedoms and rule of law that Beijing promised Hong Kong citizens would remain in place until 2047.
In a statement Monday, Ms. McLachlin noted she has reached the age of 80 and will retire as a non-permanent judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal when her current term ends on July 29.
She said she still has confidence in the independence of the court.
“While I will continue certain professional responsibilities, I intend to spend more time with my family,” Ms. McLachlin said.
“It has been a privilege serving the people of Hong Kong. I continue to have confidence in the members of the Court, their independence, and their determination to uphold the rule of law.”
In 2020, former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler, a widely respected champion of human rights, said Ms. McLachlin should consider resigning her seat to protest against China’s national-security law.
“I think it would be an important statement if she did,” Mr. Cotler said at the time.
Last December, the son of jailed pro-democracy newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai, on trial in Hong Kong for allegedly publishing seditious material and colluding with foreign forces, also urged her to step down. Sebastien Lai asked whether Ms. McLachlin wanted to remain part of a legal system that has 1,500 political prisoners.
At the time, Ms. McLachlin told The Globe she was staying on because she believes the courts are still independent.
“The court is doing a terrific job of helping maintain rights for people, insofar as the law permits it, in Hong Kong. Which is as much as our courts do,” she said. She mentioned a ruling from the Court of Final Appeal in October, 2023, that upheld a lower court’s decision to grant equal inheritance rights to same-sex couples over the government’s objections.
Ms. McLachlin became the first Canadian appointed to the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal in 2018, just months after retiring from a 28-year career on the Supreme Court, including 18 as chief justice.
When she joined the Hong Kong court as one of its 10 foreign, temporary members, the city still had a free press and allowed freedom of expression and protest.
But two years later, China established a national-security law criminalizing subversion in Hong Kong. Mr. Lai, publisher of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy tabloid and the city’s most popular newspaper, was arrested and has been in jail since December, 2020. His trial began last December, and he is facing a minimum 10-year sentence if convicted. The newspaper closed in June, 2021.
After bringing in the legislation, authorities in Hong Kong conducted sweeping arrests of most of the city’s remaining opposition figures and activists. In 2021, the People’s Congress in Beijing finalized an overhaul of Hong Kong’s electoral system that drastically curbed democratic representation in the city as authorities sought to ensure “patriots” ruled the global financial hub.
Two British judges quit the court this month – about a week after a landmark verdict that convicted 14 prominent democratic activists of subversion amid a national-security crackdown on dissent in the financial hub.
In a June 7 statement, the Hong Kong judiciary said two prominent British judges, Lawrence Collins and Mr. Sumption, had tendered their resignations from the city’s Court of Final Appeal, where they served as non-permanent judges.
“I have resigned from the Court of Final Appeal because of the political situation in Hong Kong, but I continue to have the fullest confidence in the court and the total independence of its members,” Mr. Collins told the Financial Times.
In a Financial Times column published on Monday, Mr. Sumption wrote that he had remained on the court “in the hope that the presence of overseas judges would help sustain the rule of law.”
“I fear that this is no longer realistic,” he said, adding that others are less pessimistic. “I hope that they are proved right.”
Mr. Sumption wrote of a “growing malaise” among the judiciary in Hong Kong, whom he said “have to operate in an impossible political environment created by China.”
“The rule of law is profoundly compromised in any area about which the government feels strongly,” he wrote.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong, asked for comment on Ms. McLachlin’s decision to step down, said Hong Kong’s judicial system is compromised.
“The recent conviction of 14 pro-democracy activists guilty for ‘conspiracy to subvert state power’ simply for exercising their democratic and free-speech rights demonstrates that Hong Kong’s judicial system is no longer impartial and independent,” Mr. Chong said.
“These convictions under the national-security law imposed by Beijing, along with the new Article 23 law and other changes, demonstrate that Hong Kong’s judicial system is no longer protecting the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international treaty, but is upholding the very laws that are in violation of that international treaty.”
With files from Reuters