The moves that barred the media mogul’s choice of lawyer are immune from legal challenge, giving the national security committee what one expert called ‘the powers of a police state’

The dwindling freedom in Hong Kong over the past few years has been described as “death by a thousand cuts”. Critics have been jailed, elections have been transformed into “patriots only” affairs, journalists have been harassed and hundreds of thousands of people have left.

This week, an obscure legal development has, in the eyes of some legal experts, inflicted another cut on the city’s once revered legal system.