Hong Kong (AFP) – When he saw the crowd of reporters waiting for him at Hong Kong airport, British human rights lawyer Michael Vidler knew he had been right to close his firm and flee the city.
“Are you afraid of being arrested? Are you afraid of Hong Kong’s security law?” journalists from pro-Beijing newspapers shouted as they chased him, cameras pointing at his face.
The events that led Vidler to leave the city he had called home for over three decades with just two days’ notice are testament to the withering of Hong Kong’s once-vibrant civil society — and the stifling of dissent brought by the national security law that Beijing imposed in 2020.
Vidler decided to shutter his firm when it was singled out in a national security case in February.
Vidler told AFP he never represented any of the 2019 protesters in court and that he was not contacted by national security police.
But “when I was accused of being an ‘anti-China black hand’, I had seen how that had worked out for people”, he said. “That’s why I left.”
He is not the first to make that calculation.
The scenes at the airport were almost identical to those in early March when Paul Harris, another British rights lawyer and former chairman of Hong Kong’s Bar Association, headed swiftly for a night flight just hours after a long conversation with national security police.
Harris too was labelled “anti-China” and a “favourite lawyer of the black-clad violence” — a pejorative term for the 2019 demonstrations.
“You only need to have a look at the way rights lawyers have been dealt with in mainland China to know where the wind is blowing and I believe those cold winds have arrived in Hong Kong,” Vidler said.
In April he boarded a one-way flight out of the city and his firm, Vidler & Co. Solicitors, officially ceased to operate on Friday.
