By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) -A woman who was branded a Chinese spy by Britain’s MI5 has lost her case to sue the domestic spy agency over an alert issued to politicians which said she was an agent working for Beijing, a London tribunal ruled on Tuesday.
Lawyer Christine Lee had sued MI5 over the alert issued in January 2022 in which it alleged she was “involved in political interference activities” in the United Kingdom on behalf of China’s ruling Communist Party.
The warning was circulated to lawmakers by the House of Commons speaker, who said MI5 had found that Lee had “facilitated financial donations to serving and aspiring parliamentarians on behalf of foreign nationals based in Hong Kong and China”.
Lee was born in Hong Kong and founded a firm providing consultancy services to Chinese migrants. She helped set up a parliamentary committee, chaired by Barry Gardiner, a lawmaker for the then opposition Labour Party, designed to discuss issues affecting the Chinese community in Britain.
Gardiner said he had received hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations from her, and her son had worked in his office.
She denied the MI5 allegations and sued the spy agency for unspecified damages, arguing the agency had acted unlawfully and unreasonably by labelling her a risk to the state without any prior finding of guilt.
But the Investigatory Powers Tribunal rejected the claim brought by Lee and her son. It said MI5 was within its rights to issue the Interference Alert (IA) as part of its function to protect parliamentary democracy and that the pair’s human rights had not been breached.
Lee’s lawyer said in a statement that his clients were extremely disappointed and were “considering their options”.
“Although the Investigatory Powers Tribunal’s judgment did not determine whether the espionage allegations made against Christine Lee were factually true or false, we reiterate that Christine Lee has not engaged in such activities,” the statement said.
In evidence given to the tribunal, Gardiner had queried whether the timing of the alert was to divert attention from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s admission of an unlawful gathering at Downing Street during the first COVID lockdown.
Tuesday’s ruling came a day after a Chinese national, described in a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) as a “close confidant” of Prince Andrew and banned from Britain on national security grounds, waived his right to anonymity.
While British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has sought to thaw ties with China since taking office in July, London and Beijing have repeatedly traded spying accusations, with British security services warning of Chinese attempts to infiltrate political, business and academic spheres.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Sachin Ravikumar and Ros Russell)
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