Uzra Zeya’s Remarks at Bridging the Hong Kong Sanctions Gap: UK House of Commons

As prepared for delivery at Bridging the Hong Kong Sanctions Gap: US Leadership vs UK Hesitation on Thursday, November 13, 2025 at the UK House of Commons

Good afternoon, and thank you to the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation, the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, and the APPG on Magnitsky Sanctions for inviting me to join this important discussion.

My organization, Human Rights First (HRF), has been a longtime champion of Global Magnitsky Act legislation and implementation. We also have some history focusing on Hong Kong and its current crisis. My colleague, HRF Senior Advisor Brian Dooley, who leads our human rights defenders work, documented attacks on protesters and dissidents during multiple visits to Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020.

We saw first-hand that the protesters being tear-gassed, attacked, and arrested were mostly young people struggling for a democratic future. And we know that it’s vital to stand with the activists who are preventing the Chinese government from extinguishing that hope. This is why we continue to work with activists in exile in the United States, the UK, and Europe.

I know our focus today is on government sanctions as a source of pressure and stigma, but I want to emphasize that civil society has leverage too.

In 2020, when Carrie Lam was chief executive of the Hong Kong government, her security forces physically targeted and jailed human rights defenders after a series of protests. Activists responded with a campaign focusing on the honorary fellowship she held at Wolfson College of Cambridge University. When the college’s governing body told Lam about their concerns and their plans to reconsider the fellowship, she resigned from it – paying a reputational price for her actions in a way that was welcomed by local advocates.

In that vein, British and other international judges still serving in the Hong Kong court system should know that all of us are paying attention to their decisions – especially in the context of the National Security Law – and that we won’t hesitate to publicly criticize them if and when they fall short of international human rights standards.

Of course, it’s hard to beat the megaphone that governments like the United States or the United Kingdom have. And in turn, it’s hard sometimes to get them to use that megaphone and speak out in powerful ways, given China’s political clout and commercial ties.

I understand the U.S. sanctions in March against six additional Hong Kong officials were widely welcomed. Targeted sanctions like these are always more impactful when they are multilateralized. The gold standard for that would be action by the UN Security Council, but obviously China won’t allow that. The second-best is when some or all of the Magnitsky jurisdictions act together.

We’ve seen that before, though not as often as we would like. For instance, there was a partially overlapping set of sanctions announced against Venezuelan officials this past January, coordinated across several jurisdictions. The cases of specific Russian political prisoners like Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza have prompted joint sanctions too. We even saw in 2021 joint sanctions action by the United States, UK, EU, and Canada on senior Chinese officials involved in mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

There’s no reason that these jurisdictions can’t also act together with respect to the situation in Hong Kong. The ongoing crackdown has seen sanctionable human rights abuses in abundance. As CFHK has pointed out, if it needs extra flexibility, the UK government could create a new sanctions program specifically focused on the implementation of the National Security Law, as the U.S. government has done.

Today’s discussion is framed in terms of U.S. leadership. It’s true that the United States has sometimes been the first mover on sanctions where human rights in and around China are concerned, including by being the first Magnitsky jurisdiction to sanction Chinese officials in Xinjiang in 2020.

To the extent that the United States has managed to integrate human rights concerns in its relations with China, however imperfectly, much of it is due to the engagement and insistence of civil society and Congress. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and similar laws around the world have obliged businesses to take a closer look at the presence of forced labor in the Chinese-made goods in their supply chains. Annual reporting requirements for the State Department, like the one that Congress has legislated in the Hong Kong Policy Act, often provide a hook or an action-forcing event for considering new sanctions. I know that questions and attention from Parliament, including through all-party events like this one, have a similarly vital role to play here in the UK.

But as we all know, sanctions are just one tool in the foreign policy toolkit, as the two Business Advisories for Hong Kong issued under the previous U.S. administration more deeply engaged the private sector in due diligence. Even as the United States has led on Hong Kong sanctions, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the Trump administration has done grave damage in just nine and a half months to institutions that are vital to the cause of human rights in this region. Hong Kong authorities may have forced Radio Free Asia to close its bureau there last year, but it was the Trump administration that not only dismissed the organization’s important journalism as propaganda but has now forced the entire outfit to halt its operations.

Similarly, the U.S. administration has halted Voice of America reporting and broadcasts globally, including those involving China, and terminated multiple programs assisting human rights defenders in Hong Kong and mainland China. These steps have undermined some of the people and organizations most active in seeking to bring positive democratic change.

I would urge members of Parliament, our audience, and the British government to raise related concerns with your U.S. counterparts. They need to know that their silence and inaction on these other deeply harmful steps risk making their broader commitments ring hollow.

Thank you for the opportunity to join this conversation. I want to congratulate Chloe Cheung on being recognized later tonight at the Magnitsky Awards as this year’s Outstanding Young Human Rights Activist, and to say thanks to all the other activists and civil society leaders here for their important work as well.