Long-awaited Hong Kong sex offences reform bill to be gazetted Friday

A long-awaited slate of sex crime reforms including the criminalisation of persistent child sexual abuse and “cyberflashing” has been set to be gazetted this Friday, with the bill due for scrutiny at the legislature later this month.

The Sexual Offences Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2026 “aims to achieve two policy objectives, namely, strengthening protection for victims of sexual offences, and modernising the laws on sexual offences in Hong Kong to keep pace with the times,” the Security Bureau said in a Wednesday statement.

The reforms aim to review the city’s decades-old sex crimes laws and bring them up to date, “to address the inadequacies of the current provisions and respond to changes in social perceptions related to sexual offences,” it said.

‘Keep pace with the times’

The draft law will be published in the government gazette this Friday before being introduced to the Legislative Council on November 25. The government aims to complete the legislative exercise before its current term ends in June next year.

“We hope to improve the laws on sexual offences in Hong Kong, the earlier the better, to strengthen protection for victims of sexual offences while ensuring that the laws on sexual offences can keep pace with the times,” the bureau’s spokesperson said.

The legislative revamp was met with calls for stronger protections when it was first put forward this July, including over its lack of a persistent child sexual abuse offence.

Following those calls, the government in September proposed creating new offences to criminalise prolonged and repeated sexual abuse against children as well as sending digital pictures of one’s genitals without consent, known as “cyberflashing.”

As part of the sex crime reforms, the government has proposed two new offences in place of indecent assault: sexual assault involving touching and sexual assault without touching. It also seeks to expand the scope of rape to cover male and transgender survivors.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups have continued to call on the government to impose limits on a defence allowing a sexual assault suspect to claim they mistakenly believed they had been given consent.

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James Lee is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in culture and social issues. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he witnessed the institution’s transformation over the course of the 2019 extradition bill protests and after the passing of the Beijing-imposed security law.

Since joining HKFP in 2023, he has covered local politics, the city’s housing crisis, as well as landmark court cases including the 47 democrats national security trial. He was previously a reporter at The Standard where he interviewed pro-establishment heavyweights and extensively covered the Covid-19 pandemic and Hong Kong’s political overhauls under the national security law.