Grenville Cross says jurisdictions everywhere have laws designed to discourage people from harboring, financing, or otherwise assisting criminal suspects
Although Kwok Yin-sang made history on Feb 26 by becoming the first person convicted of a non-sedition-related offense under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO), few will envy him for that. After a trial in which he pleaded not guilty, he was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment for “attempting to deal with, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources” belonging to an absconder. He tried to encash an insurance policy worth approximately HK$88,000 ($11,250) in the name of his daughter, Anna Kwok Fung-yee, a national security fugitive based in the United States.
Even though Kwok knew his daughter had been designated as an absconder under the SNSO, he sought to deal with her financial assets, an offense punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment (s. 90, SNSO). There is, for good reason, a prohibition on dealing with funds, stocks, shares, deposits, or other financial assets belonging to or controlled by designated absconders. The ban is directed not only at making life difficult for absconders and cutting off their resources, but also at compelling them to return (however remote the possibility). In other words, it helps close a loophole that absconders would otherwise seek to exploit.
Whereas the SNSO was enacted on March 23, 2024, the police, on Aug 4, 2025, reminded the public that, except under the authority of a license granted by the secretary for security, it is an offense for anybody to deal “with any funds or other financial assets or economic resources belonging to, or owned or controlled by, a relevant absconder”. Anybody who ignored the warning was very unwise, and Kwok has learned the hard way that defying the law has consequences. It is a defense for someone to show that he did not know and had no reason to believe he was dealing with the funds of an absconder, but this could not avail Kwok, who understood his daughter’s situation perfectly.
Having supported the 2019 insurrection, Anna Kwok decided her future lay with anti-China forces in the US. She became the executive director of the US-based Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), whose chairman is Brian Leung Kai-ping (who fled to the US after trashing the Legislative Council on July 1, 2019) and whose advisory board includes Ted Hui Chi-fung (a convicted felon and national security fugitive). The HKDC is viewed as a tool of US foreign policy, and Kwok has used her position (according to her arrest warrant) to try to harm Hong Kong by meeting with “foreign politicians and government officials to request imposing sanctions and blockade, and engaging in other hostile activities against the People’s Republic of China and the HKSAR”. Not surprisingly, she is accused of colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security, and an arrest warrant was issued in 2023. The police have offered a reward of HK$1,000,000 for anyone who can “provide information on this wanted person and the related crime”.
Although Kwok was hopefully appalled by his daughter’s betrayal, it is a tragedy that he did not cut his ties with her. Instead, he met her in Japan in early 2025 to obtain her signature on the policy’s termination application, which was playing with fire. He must have known the implications of his actions, and he has now paid the price. As the acting principal magistrate, Andy Cheng Lim-chi, explained, Kwok had twice handled documents within two months to obtain payment and had impersonated the fugitive by signing on her behalf. Cheng said that if the attempted offense had succeeded, it would have undermined the authorities’ efforts to compel Anna Kwok to return.
Even if Kwok had not intended to pass the money to his daughter, Cheng emphasized that the offense was serious. However, he made clear there was no such thing as “collective punishment, and it has nothing to do with whether the defendant and the fugitive are family”.
After Kwok’s sentencing, the Hong Kong authorities explained they acted “in accordance with the law”, with law enforcement actions having “nothing to do with their political stance, background or occupation”. There was a “responsibility to pursue those who are suspected to have committed offenses endangering national security, even if they have absconded overseas”. Law enforcement agencies everywhere will sympathize with those sentiments, which is why so many Western countries also have robust national security laws in place.
Although Anna Kwok was understandably upset over her father’s predicament, she must know she helped bring it about. However, as a propagandist, she decided to milk the situation for all it was worth. She said Kwok’s imprisonment showed political freedoms “reaching a new low in Hong Kong”, which is the sort of tripe the HKDC regularly serves up at the US Congress.
The HKDC has established close links with Hong Kong Watch, the London-based anti-China hate machine, whose co-founder, the serial fantasist Benedict Rogers, eagerly jumped on the bandwagon. Having expressed his “solidarity” with Anna Kwok, he described Kwok’s imprisonment as “an appalling, outrageous miscarriage of justice” — words he has yet to direct at those responsible for the Gaza genocide, about which he is always strangely silent.
In the US, the usual suspects also weighed in. The US assistant secretary of state, Riley Barnes, who doubles up as US “special coordinator for Tibetan issues” (a title created to irritate Beijing) and visited India last July to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday, declared, “The US condemns the Hong Kong court’s sentencing of Kwok Yin-sang.” He said the targeting of individuals advocating basic freedoms in Hong Kong and their families was “unacceptable”, which served only to demonstrate his total ignorance of what the case was all about.
Not to be outdone, US Senator Jeff Merkley, a veteran China critic who has sought to have sanctions imposed on Hong Kong judges and prosecutors and sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also muscled in. Having described Kwok’s punishment as “cruel”, he called it “the latest act of the Chinese government reaching across borders to silence dissent”. If nothing else, this showed he was either unaware of how Hong Kong’s independent legal system operates under the “one country, two systems” framework, or that he knew but was only interested in cheap politicking.
Anybody listening to Rogers, Barnes and Merkley would imagine that only Hong Kong clamps down on those who assist offenders, financially or otherwise. That, however, could not be further from the truth. Jurisdictions everywhere have laws to discourage people from harboring, financing, or otherwise assisting criminal suspects, and those who violate them, whether accomplices, family, or friends, are asking for trouble.
In the United Kingdom, for example, there is a battery of laws designed to make life difficult for anybody assisting criminals or criminal suspects. It is a specific offense to assist an offender (Criminal Law Act 1967). Dealing with an offender’s money is also criminalized (Proceeds of Crime Act 2002). More particularly, if an absconder is believed to have been involved in terrorism, then anybody dealing with their funds is guilty of an offense under the UK Terrorism Act 2000 (this could have helped inspire the Hong Kong law).
In the US, moreover, anybody who, knowing a federal crime has been convicted, assists an offender, whether to avoid apprehension, trial or punishment, is prosecutable as an accessory after the fact (USC 18 USC.3). As Barnes and Merkley were presumably aware, the offense is broad enough to include not only the provision of direct financial assistance to an offender, but also dealing in or otherwise handling an offender's assets. As in the UK, it is not a defense that the suspect is related to the offender.
In 2019, moreover, a British couple, John Letts and Sally Lane, were sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment (suspended) for financing terrorism. This was after they sent 223 pounds ($298) to their son, Jack Letts, a Muslim convert, who had joined the Islamic State group in Syria. Although they did not support terrorism and feared their son was in “immediate mortal danger”,” the British authorities came down on them like a ton of bricks. All they had wanted to do was help to finance their son’s escape, but this cut no ice.
Although the laws in different jurisdictions are not identically framed, they share common objectives. They are designed to make life as difficult as possible for offenders, criminal suspects, and absconders. They also seek to deter conduct that benefits criminals, whether directly or indirectly. One of the most effective ways to deal with fugitives is to hit them in the pocket, denying them access to the funds that sustain them. Although ingenues like Anna Kwok might have difficulty in getting their heads around such elementary propositions, ideologues like Rogers, Barnes and Merkley have no such excuse.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
