By Frank Chen
For years, Western governments have claimed to be defending the "rule of law" and democracy in Hong Kong. Yet their approach to the Jimmy Lai case increasingly reveals something else: a geopolitical reflex in which the acceptable outcome is decided first, and the argument is fitted afterwards. In London, Washington, and other Western capitals, Lai's name is invoked less to illuminate law than to anchor a familiar China narrative: politically correct, moral, and conveniently simple. It is less an argument about law than an attempt to pre-empt law, less a concern for procedure than a demand for a desirable result. That is why the most common refrain is not "read the judgment" or "examine the evidence", but a blunt political demand: release him. A court process is being treated as an obstacle to be managed, not a standard to be respected.
The procedural record is not in dispute. Lai was convicted in December 2025 of two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiracy to publish seditious materials, and was scheduled to be sentenced on 9 February 2026. He pleaded not guilty and continues to deny wrongdoing. His trial began in December 2023 and ran for 156 days. You do not get to wave away months of testimony with political slogans, unless you are willing to admit that law, here, is being treated as stage scenery.
Western capitals have, nevertheless, treated "release" as the starting point. The UK foreign secretary told Parliament the prosecution was "politically motivated" and called for Lai's "immediate release". The United States Department of State urged the authorities to "bring this ordeal to an end" and pressed for his release. The European Union called for "immediate and unconditional release", while the G7 urged Hong Kong to end prosecutions and release him. The sequence is revealing: outcome first, reasons later—if ever. That is not legal reasoning; it is political pressure.
The recent debate in the UK's House of Commons makes the instrumentalisation even starker. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer confirmed he raised Lai's case with President Xi Jinping during his China visit. Yet the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, quickly labelled the trip a "failure" because it did not "secure" Lai's release. That language treats a foreign court outcome as a diplomatic deliverable to be bargained for. A verdict is not a souvenir to be brought back from Beijing. It is hard to claim devotion to judicial independence while demanding a prime minister return from Beijing with someone else's verdict in his briefcase.
What Western debate tends to avoid is the substance of Jimmy Lai's case. Public reporting of the prosecution's case has repeatedly centred on allegations that Lai and others worked with overseas politicians and activists to solicit "sanctions, blockades or other hostile activity" against the Hong Kong SAR and the Central Government, describing those foreign collaborations as long‑term and persistent. It is reported that 161 articles were deemed seditious, including 33 opinion columns written by Jimmy Lai. Readers may argue about statutory breadth or sentencing proportionality; those are legitimate debates. What is not intellectually and legally serious is to demand "release" while refusing to engage the allegations and the evidentiary record that the court considered.
Hong Kong's constitutional principles are explicitly set out in the Basic Law: its courts "shall exercise judicial power independently, free from any interference", and its Department of Justice "shall control criminal prosecutions, free from any interference". In January 2026, Hong Kong's Chief Justice Andrew Cheung addressed threats of sanctions against judges, warning that intimidation and threats are "no different from bribery and corruption" because both subvert justice. If foreign governments sincerely care about the rule of law and judicial independence, they should refrain from interfering with the judicial process of Jimmy Lai's case.
Some Western advocacy groups insist that the acts Lai is accused of crimes only because of political reasons. That assertion collapses the moment one turns the lens back on Western practice. When David Ballantyne Smith, a UK embassy security guard in Berlin, pleaded guilty to Official Secrets Act offences involving passing information useful to Russia, a London court sentenced him to 13 years and two months in prison. There was no G7 country demand that London "end the prosecution". No foreign campaign treated the verdict as negotiable. At home, they call it national security. Abroad, they call it suppression of free speech.
The same standard applies in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Jonathan Toebbe was sentenced to 232 months (over 19 years) for an espionage‑related conspiracy involving restricted data about nuclear‑powered warships. And when American institutions judged that constitutional order was threatened after 6 January 2021, prosecutors used seditious conspiracy; the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, received 22 years. Western democracies do not hesitate to deploy heavy legal tools when they decide the state is at stake, then they expect the world to treat those outcomes as the product of law, not politics.
Western regulatory architecture confirms the same instinct. Britain's Foreign Influence Registration Scheme is designed to improve understanding of activity carried out "at the instruction of a foreign state". The US Foreign Agents Registration Act regime, as described by the Justice Department, requires certain agents of foreign principals engaged in political activities to disclose relationships and activities. In other words, "foreign influence" is a legitimate concern at home, and a moral outrage only when another jurisdiction prosecutes alleged foreign collaboration, and when they become the foreign influence.
International order works only if states accept restraints on interference, especially when domestic politics tempts them to escalate. The United Nations General Assembly's 1970 Declaration on Friendly Relations states that no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, "for any reason whatever", in another state's internal affairs. The International Court of Justice has likewise treated coercion as the essence of prohibited intervention. In a post‑unipolar world, attempts to turn a court case into diplomatic leverage do not defend "rules"; they advertise that the rules are conditional on who is being judged. At the end of the day, the rule of law means letting courts decide—not geopolitics.
Frank Chen is a Research Associate in International Relations at the Hong Kong New Emerging Technology Education Charity Foundation. He holds an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from CUHK and a Bachelor's degree in Globalisation and Development from HKBU.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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