For the first time in 26 years, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) in Hong Kong will not be giving out the Human Rights Press Awards, which recognise top rights-related reporting from around Asia, with the goal of increasing respect for people’s basic rights and focusing attention on threats to those freedoms.

According to a statement by Kith Richburg, the organisation’s president after a meeting of the FCC board on Saturday, the suspension is due to “new ‘red lines’ [by the government] on what is and is not permissible”.

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“I know this is an unusual step to take so late in the process, just weeks before we were set to announce the winners,” Richburg, a former Washington Post correspondent and current columnist for the paper, said.

“It is likely to be deeply disappointing to all those who took time to enter, to the judges and everyone else who invested their time and energy into this project.

“Over the last two years, journalists in Hong Kong have been operating under new “red lines” on what is and is not permissible, but there remain significant areas of uncertainty and we do not wish unintentionally to violate the law. This is the context in which we decided to suspend the Awards.”

He explained that the decision to suspend the award did not reflect the FCC Board’s view of the content of any of the entries or the work of the independent judges.

“The FCC intends to continue promoting press freedom in Hong Kong, while recognising that recent developments might also require changes to our approach,” he added.

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“This was a very tough decision to reach. We explored a variety of other options, but could not find a feasible way forward. It is particularly painful coming less than two weeks before May 3, World Press Freedom Day, when we normally announce the HRPA winners and celebrate their journalism.”

The suspension of the award has attracted backlash from various people, including resignations from board members, with the Washington Post reporting Mary Hui, a reporter with Quartz covering geopolitics and business in Asia, as one of eight members who resigned on Monday.

“By cancelling the awards, I think we send a rather worrying message that defending press freedom as the stated mission of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club is no longer tenable,” Hui said.

Connie Lo, a veteran documentary filmmaker and one of the adjudicators for four categories of the awards, said the club’s choice to suspend the awards is “an insult to the journalism industry”.

“Many times reporters had to risk their lives to pursue their journalistic works,” Lo said. “This year’s awards holds a special meaning to journalists from news outlets that have already disappeared.”

In recent times, Hong Kong has experienced a crackdown on its media freedom. Arrests were made and outlets were forced to shut down. In February, the International Federation for Journalists had called on governments to offer support and pathways for Hong Kong journalists seeking to flee the city and find refuge to keep working.