Hong Kong Watch is deeply concerned that Wu Chi-wai, former chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party and one of the ‘Hong Kong 47’, has been officially refused entry to the UK, facing deportation back to Hong Kong within seven days. Wu, a political prisoner, was allowed to enter the United Kingdom on temporary admission, following a deeply alarming situation at Heathrow Airport, where he was told his passport would be confiscated and that he faced deportation back to Hong Kong within seven days.

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Wu holds British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) status, and after his release [from Chinese prison] he travelled to Britain to settle under the BN(O) visa route, which allows eligible Hong Kongers to apply for residence without going through the standard overseas asylum process. He was informed that he could apply for BN(O) status within the UK by the British Consulate in Hong Kong. Despite this, he was detained on arrival, his passport confiscated, and told he faced removal within a week. The Home Office described it as an administrative issue with his paperwork. Mr Wu has now entered the UK under temporary admission while officially refused, meaning the threat of deportation remains pending review.

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“Detention and threatened deportation of a pro-democracy advocate is the sort of belligerent behaviour I associate with the Chinese Communist Party rather than the UK," says Lord Alton of Liverpool, Patron of Hong Kong Watch and Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

"Shabana Mahmood [the UK Home Secretary] has had a long and honourable track record in calling out the many violations of human rights in China. I hope she will find out what happened at Heathrow and explain the difference between dictatorship and democracy to whoever threatened Mr Wu.”

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Wu Chi-wai, 63, spent eight years as a Legislative Councillor, Hong Kong’s equivalent of an MP, and became chairman of the Democratic Party in 2016. A former social worker who studied in the United States, he built his political career around the pro-democracy movement the party had championed since its founding ahead of the 1997 handover.

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In 2020, Wu helped organise an unofficial “primary election” ahead of Legislative Council elections, the first real test of Beijing’s newly imposed Hong Kong National Security Law. That law, introduced on 30 June 2020, criminalised secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign collusion.

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Wu was arrested in the security sweep that followed in November 2020, charged in 2021, and pleaded guilty the following year, as most of his co-defendants did, believing conviction was inevitable and that a plea would reduce his sentence. He received four years and five months in prison as part of the Hong Kong 47 case, in which 45 of the 47 defendants were jailed for between four and seven years. He was released on 30 June 2026 after serving his full term.

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