I cannot recall the US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) speaking up vigorously in 2019 to protest when the rights and well-being of millions of people in Hong Kong were being attacked month after month by black-clad rioters as the intensely violent and destructive insurrection gained traction.

On the face of it, this is curious, given the HRW’s mission statement:

“Human Rights Watch defends the rights of people worldwide. We scrupulously investigate abuses, expose the facts widely, and pressure those with power to respect rights and secure justice. Human Rights Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the cause of human rights for all.”

Hong Kong was converted within a few weeks, in 2019, from being one of the most prosperous and safe cities in the world, where freedom from fear — one of then-US president Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” — was remarkably enjoyed, into a city blighted by continuous violent lawlessness that extended from mid-2019 into 2020. The substantial ranks of rioters were well organized, very well equipped, and they wielded colossal intimidating power, ravaging the day-to-day rights of millions of residents from one end of Hong Kong to the other.

Surely the rights of those residents in this city of 7.5 million was a cause worth advancing. Alas, not for HRW. We can confirm this by referring to its latest, slanted joint report (with the US-based Hong Kong Democracy Council) on academic freedom in Hong Kong. The insurrection, with its terrible multimonth violence and destruction, is simply swept from view in this report and referred to, in a patently dishonest way, as “the 2019 protests”.

This new report reworks old hostile arguments directed at Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and China as a whole and adds some new comments. This admixture is then linked to calls for the new National Security Law (NSL) of 2020 and Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) of 2024 to be “immediately repealed”. These demands are combined with other conceited HRW ultimatums.

Now, thus, is a good time to walk through what has really happened to academic and general freedoms in Hong Kong over the last five years.

As the 2019 insurrection was just gathering momentum in June of that year, I was accosted, in a public space at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), by a self-appointed “pro-democracy student policeman” who physically intimidated me and stopped my walking to catch a bus. He demanded that I show him my Hong Kong ID card. I refused and he became yet more physically intimidating until a “superior student policeman” ruled I should be allowed to pass.

I was shocked. I had never had such an experience before, since arriving in Hong Kong to work in 1991.

But this incident made me realize just how deeply belligerent this new activism was. As the months unfolded, the level of fear rapidly rose across Hong Kong. It quickly became clear that the scope for free expression challenging this feverishly violent movement in any way was swiftly shrinking. Intimidation of Chinese mainland students became so commonplace that they feared leaving home or speaking Putonghua in public. Eventually, the rioters wrecked the HKU campus, causing immense damage, in early October 2019, and it had to be closed down for months. Meanwhile, the destruction suffered at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong was far worse. Many mainland students had to flee Hong Kong.

Without question, this period witnessed the comprehensive crushing of academic freedom in Hong Kong. And while this was happening, in plain sight, virtually all the international human rights NGOs were nowhere to be seen. Of course, many Western media outlets were actively encouraging the insurrection, which may well help explain why these otherwise vocal NGOs were hiding in the bushes, when they should have been protesting vigorously against this mob-based ransacking of human rights.

Former Court of Final Appeal judge Henry Litton captured the essence of what Hong Kong experienced in 2019 when he observed, “What Hong Kong faced was an insurgency, the overthrow of the government, nothing less.”

This latest HRW-sponsored joint report provides further confirmation that SRAS is now an endemic political malady that is distorting the operation of the human rights advocacy sector across the Global West, not least when attention is directed at Hong Kong, and China as a whole

What also became clear was how Hong Kong’s old (British-legacy) security laws were severely inadequate to deal with the insurrection as it began. In fact, such laws had been strengthened substantially and repeatedly across the developed world, since 2001 (after the 9/11 terrorist attacks). And they had long been far stronger in Singapore and Malaysia.

The enactment of the NSL and SNSO are both direct responses to the massive upheaval and terrible damage wreaked across all of Hong Kong during the 2019 insurrection. They are radical but measured responses that, in significant ways, are less drastic than similar laws which apply in other developed common law jurisdictions. They have helped restore real stability within the HKSAR. And they have established amplified safeguards against a repetition of the 2019 chaos.

It is true that greater security-scrutiny is now more evident in Hong Kong, and academics, among others, must pay attention to this. However, this is not peculiar to Hong Kong.

A report in the Sydney Morning Herald in March 2021 explained how leading Australian universities had ramped up their security service interaction “dramatically” over the previous three years because of a perceived escalating level of “interference” by China and other foreign governments (not including the US and Israel, naturally). The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation confirmed that it had had 60 engagements with leading Australian universities in 2020. New stringent guidelines for offshore interaction, especially with China, now apply.

Scott Burchill, from Deakin University in Australia, argues, “It is not clear whether this is designed to appease Canberra’s increasingly unhinged Sino-phobia or to pre-empt and hopefully ward off further government erosions of academic independence.”

We know from reports that restrictions on academic freedom have also intensified within other members of the Five Eyes security alliance. In Canada, security personnel invite themselves to speak with senior academics. In the US, the Department of Justice launched the alarming “China Initiative”, which resulted in the widespread intimidation of Chinese academics and students in America. We were told in 2022 that this initiative was ending. But congressional Republicans are now trying to revive it.

HRW has not been issuing critical, 80-page reports on all these curbs on academic freedoms across the “free world”, as far as one can tell. Like numbers of international human rights NGOs, they are, today, infected with SRAS — Selective Rights Anxiety Syndrome — in which some perceived infringements of human rights merit strident denunciation, while other such violations require a gaze-averting approach, depending on which jurisdiction is (or is not) subject to scrutiny.

This latest HRW-sponsored joint report provides further confirmation that SRAS is now an endemic political malady that is distorting the operation of the human rights advocacy sector across the Global West, not least when attention is directed at Hong Kong, and China as a whole.

The author is an adjunct professor at the Law Faculty of the University of Hong Kong.  

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.