Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng today explained the national security law should not be retrospective and that exceptions would be limited to a small number of situations.

Ms Cheng made the remarks after attending a radio programme this morning.

She said: “At the moment nobody has seen the draft legislation, so it’s not possible to say what is going to happen there.

“But insofar as retrospectivity is concerned, as a matter of principle, criminal charges are not to be made retrospectively and therefore there ought not be retrospective effect when the law is legislated.

“However there are always some exceptions when the exceptions arise in relation to treaty and customary international law, but they are generally a very narrow, a very small amount of situations.”

Ms Cheng pointed out that under Article 63 of the Basic Law, the Department of Justice is responsible for criminal prosecution matters without any interference.

“Therefore we will make our decision in relation to the prosecution, whether or not to prosecute and ultimately to take charge of the prosecution matter in court in accordance with the evidence, the law and the relevant prosecution code, so this is how we’re going to do it.

“The relevant law enforcement agency will give us the file and probably Police will be the law enforcement agency. We’ll have the file and then we’ll look at it just in any other normal way.”