On May 7, in a historic verdict, Peter Wai and Bill Yuen were found guilty of assisting a foreign intelligence service under the U.K. National Security Act. Their convictions send an unambiguous message: transnational repression by the Chinese Communist Party has no place on British soil.
Remarkably, on the same day, the United States and Norway delivered that message too. That three liberal democracies acted against Beijing＊s long arm on a single day was not coordinated 〞 but perhaps it should have been.
Peter Wai, office manager of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London and Bill Yuen, a U.K. immigration official, were convicted for their roles in a ※shadow policing operation.§ Wai＊s position at the HKETO lent weight to longstanding concerns from civil society groups that HKETOs, which are nominally trade missions, function as additional diplomatic outposts through which the Chinese Communist Party extends its surveillance reach and advances its anti-democratic agenda abroad. Yuen, meanwhile, was found to have exploited his access to British government databases to extract sensitive immigration data on Hong Kong dissidents living in the United Kingdom, turning the machinery of the state against the very people it was meant to protect.
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