Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam returns Cambridge fellowship over rights row

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam says she has "returned" her honorary fellowship to a Cambridge college after a row over whether the finance hub's academic freedoms are being suppressed broke out.

China's authorities have cracked down on pro-democracy opponents in the city.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam said she was cutting ties with Cambridge's Wolfson College after it began looking into the state of academic liberty in Hong Kong. She said she was "deeply disappointed by the college smearing a person on the basis of hearsay instead of facts".

"Therefore I can hardly convince myself to maintain any relation with Wolfson College," she wrote on Facebook late Saturday alongside a photo of herself in leafy Cambridge.

Wolfson College said it had recently raised concerns with Hong Kong's leader about "her commitment to the protection of human rights and the freedom of expression".

Its governing body had been due to consider Lam's fellowship next month but would no longer do so now that Lam had returned the honour.

Lam, a pro-Beijing appointee, was one of a number of Chinese and Hong Kong officials sanctioned by the United States after Beijing imposed a sweeping security law on the semi-autonomous city in late June.

The said security law ramps up the Chinese Communist Party's control over the finance hub.

In the weeks that followed the imposition of the law, some two dozen pro-democracy supporters have been arrested under the new powers, including the owner of a Beijing-critical newspaper. Others have been disqualified from standing in local elections while libraries and schools have begun pulling any books deemed to breach the law.