JUSTICE doesn’t always die in front of a firing squad. For Jimmy Lai, a 78-year-old British citizen, the Chinese Communist Party simply sent over a certificate that ensures he will probably die alone in a prison cell. Before his Hong Kong trial even began, the state issued a ‘certificate’ under the National Security Law. It abolished the jury and replaced 12 of Lai’s peers with three government-approved judges, ensuring the verdict was written before opening arguments were even made. With the British government also moving to scrap jury trials, is our justice system beginning to emulate China’s?
Jimmy Lai was a refugee from Mao’s China who worked his way up from the factory floor. He risked everything to found Apple Daily, the only newspaper in Hong Kong that dared to speak truth to the Chinese Communist Party. For decades, and particularly during the mass pro-democracy protests of 2019, he stood on the front lines and refused to stop his printing presses or flee the city even as it became clear what his fate would be. Lai was convicted on December 15 of ‘collusion’ and ‘sedition’. The verdict was handed down by the three judges, reading from an 855-page political script which was probably drafted before the trial started.
Commentators in the UK have rightly called the judgment a sham because the removal of the jury stripped away the only mechanism that protects the citizen and his or her liberty from the overbearing state. If you listen to the reasons Beijing gave for abolishing the jury in this case, it sounds uncomfortably familiar.
Under Article 46 of the National Security Law, Hong Kong’s Justice Secretary can issue a certificate to ban a jury trial. The stated justification is ‘efficiency’ and the ‘personal safety of jurors’, echoes of the justifications we are hearing at home. Juries are messy and slow. It is safer, cheaper, and faster to let state-appointed experts decide who goes to prison . . .
Right now, the UK government is floating proposals to scrap jury trials for ‘either-way’ offences to clear court backlogs. David Lammy is not a communist apparatchik. The motivation here is bureaucratic desperation rather than political suppression. The court backlog is real and it is an outrage that victims are waiting years for justice. The argument is that by removing juries for ‘minor’ offences, we can process the guilty faster and save money.
On all sides of the political debate, we should encourage efficiency and cutting waste, but we must be honest about what we are doing. If we remove the jury to save money, we are building the same switch that Beijing used to silence Jimmy Lai and establishing the principle that the right to a jury is conditional on the state’s budget. Once you establish that a jury is an ‘optional extra’ rather than a fundamental right, you have done the hard work for the authoritarians of the future. If the switch is there, some future government will flick it.
In Hong Kong, the state knew 12 ordinary citizens might look at an old man writing newspaper articles about the importance of democracy and refuse to ‘disappear’ him. They knew a jury might value the individual over the efficacy of the state. So, to get the verdict they wanted, they had to remove the ordinary citizens from the courtroom.
In Britain, we are not jailing journalists for life, but we are adopting the dangerous premise that efficiency is more important than liberty and are accepting the idea that the 12 honest men and women are an obstacle to be managed rather than a right to be defended.
The tragedy of Jimmy Lai is that he is in prison for the crime of championing democracy, but the warning for us is that the mechanism used to silence him was a legal system streamlined to prioritise the state’s certainty over the citizen’s liberty.
The best way to honour a British citizen who will inevitably lose his life in the pursuit of liberty and democracy is to ensure that when a British citizen walks into a British court, they still face their equals, not just a panel of employees of the state.
Ultimately, freedom is inefficient and justice is expensive. Jimmy Lai has paid for his principles with his life, and the least we can do is pay for our juries.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on January 8, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
