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Three former organizers of Hong Kong’s annual vigil to commemorate victims of China’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests were jailed Saturday for four and a half months for failing to inform authorities about the group under national security laws. .
Chow Hang-tung, Tang Ngok-kwan and Tsui Hon-kwong were arrested in 2021 while fighting the city’s pro-democracy movement after massive protests more than three years ago. He was the leader of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Chinese Patriotic Democratic Movement and was found guilty last week.
The now-defunct alliance is best known for organizing candlelight vigils in Hong Kong on the anniversary of the 1989 Chinese military crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, but is slated to disband in 2021 under Beijing’s imposed national security shadow. the law.
Supporters say the closure represents a waning of the freedoms and autonomy promised when Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997.
Before his dismissal, the police had requested details of his operations and finances related to his ties to democracy groups abroad, pointing to him as a foreign agent. But the group refused to cooperate, because the police did not have the right to request information because they were not foreign agents and the authorities did not provide enough information.
According to the implementation rules of the security law, the police chief can request some information from foreign agents. Failure to comply with the request could result in six months in prison and a fine of 100,000 Hong Kong dollars ($17,600 Cdn) if convicted.
Activists deny the group is a foreign agent
In his mitigation, Chow said that the alliance was not a foreign agent and there was nothing to prove it, so the sentence was to punish someone for defending the truth.
He said that national security is being used as a pretext for war against civil society.
“Sir, our punishment is for our insubordination if you have to, but when exercising power based on lies, being insubordinate is the only way to be human,” she said.
Handing down the sentence, chief justice Peter Law said the case was the first under the new law and the sentence should send a clear message to the public that the law does not condone offences.
Law, who was approved by city leaders to oversee the case, said there was no reason to reduce the four-and-a-half-month sentence.
In previous legal proceedings, the court ordered the partial redaction of some information after prosecutors said full disclosure of the information would jeopardize an ongoing investigation into the national security case. Therefore, some important details, including the names of groups allegedly associated with the alliance, were omitted.
Defense lawyer Philip Dykes said he could not say “how strong or weak” the alleged relationship was and made mitigation difficult.
Vigil is banned in 2020
The annual vigil organized by the alliance was the only large-scale public commemoration of the June 4 crackdown on Chinese soil and was well attended until authorities banned it in 2020, citing anti-pandemic measures.
Chow, along with two other former alliance leaders, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, were charged with subverting state power under the security law in 2021. The alliance itself was charged with subversion.
National security laws prohibit secession, subversion, and collusion with foreign forces to interfere in the city’s affairs as well as terrorism. Many pro-democracy activists were silenced or jailed after the 2020 crackdown.
In a separate case, Elizabeth Tang, who was arrested for endangering national security earlier this week, was released on bail on Saturday. Tang is a veteran labor activist and so is Lee’s husband.
In an unnamed statement Thursday, police said they arrested a 65-year-old woman on Hong Kong Island on suspicion of colluding with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. He said he was being held for investigation.
“I feel like I don’t know because my work has always been about workers’ rights and organizing unions. So I don’t know why I was accused of breaking the law and endangering national security,” he told reporters on Saturday after his release.
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