Proposed cybercrime law needs long reach to cover offences outside Hong Kong, compel tech giants to cooperate: legislators
- Lawmakers discuss blueprint to create five specific new offences to rein in cyber-dependent crimes and say lack of long-arm jurisdiction would make proposal useless
- ‘This is how to give the law some teeth, otherwise the law could be well-written with gates and walls made of metal, but with a back door made of straw,’ one adds
A proposed law to clamp down on cybercrimes must enjoy a “long-arm jurisdiction” to cover offences outside Hong Kong and be able to compel technology giants to assist in investigations, legislators have said.
The lawyers overseeing the effort said the proposed offences should in principle allow for extraterritorial reach if a case involved a Hong Kong victim or affected the city, but they added that more research was needed to determine how it would be enforced.
The discussion took place at a Legislative Council meeting on Monday, where legislators and legal experts discussed the Law Reform Commission’s proposal to create five specific new offences to rein in cyber-dependent crimes.
The five crimes, proposed in July, would be illegal access to a programme or data, computer data interception and interference, computer system interference, and provision or possession of devices or data for criminal purposes.
Beijing loyalist lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu argued at the Legco meeting that the proposed law would be useless if it could not be applied to companies based overseas.
