New Zealand has become the latest country to suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong in protest against China’s new national security law that has been imposed on the island. New Zealand is the most recent member of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing alliance to take action. The UK, Australia and Canada have already suspended their extradition treaties, with the fifth, the US signalling it is preparing to do the same. Donald Trump recently ended Hong Kong’s preferential economic treatment and put laws in place punishing banks that do business with Chinese officials who helped enact the new national security law in the city.
Winston Peters, New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister, said in a statement: ‘New Zealand can no longer trust that Hong Kong's criminal justice system is sufficiently independent from China’, adding, ‘If China in future shows adherence to the 'one country, two systems' framework then we could reconsider this decision’. The legislation, which came into effect last month, punishes what China terms as secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign interference with up to life in prison.
China’s embassy in the capital has responded by urging New Zealand to reconsider such a move and ‘stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs and China's internal affairs, and refrain from going any further down the wrong path.
Also, Google has announced it plans to lay a new undersea fibre-optic cable between the US and both the UK and Spain. The cable, to be named Grace Hopper after the American computer programming pioneer, is intended to provide ‘better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products’. At the moment undersea cables carry 98% of international internet traffic around the world, however, due to the new cable incorporating ‘novel optical fibre switching’ internet traffic will be able to move around outages more competently than before. The cable is expected to be up and running by 2022.