Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2025
This chapter tracks the modernisation of the extradition law of Hong Kong against the backdrop of empire-wide legal reform. In 1865–73, two explosive scandals caused imperial officials and judges to impose belated restrictions on the colonial removal of fugitives to China. The first, the case of How Yu-teen (1865), involved embarrassing allegations of British complicity in China’s violent execution of a political refugee; the second, Attorney General of Hong Kong v. Kwok-a-Sing (1873), was a habeas corpus dispute born of colonial infighting and the only extradition dispute to reach the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the nineteenth century. These scandals propelled Hong Kong away from the flexible and jurisdictional practice of rendition, as imperial officials ignored colonial fears of establishing a Chinese ‘Alsatia’ – a disreputable refuge for Chinese criminals. The new reality – the imperially homogenous, late-Victorian law of extradition – carried drastically heightened and irreversible expectations of individual rights and executive comportment.
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