Hong Kong (AsiaNews) – Seven years and three months’ imprisonment for lawyer Chow Hang-tung, seven years for trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan, and five years and two months for former MP Albert Ho, the only one of the three to have adopted a guilty plea strategy during the trial. These are the sentences handed down today to the three leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the movement which, until 2019, organised vigils in the former British colony on 4 June to commemorate the massacre of students that took place on this day in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
The verdict was handed down this morning by judges appointed to hear ‘national security cases’ at the West Kowloon Court. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China – the organisation once led by the three activists and dissolved following the entry into force in 2020 of the draconian National Security Law – was also fined 1.5 million Hong Kong dollars (approximately 165,000 euros – ed.), to be paid within three months.
The convictions relate to the offence of “incitement to subversion”. Chow (41) and Lee (69) have already been detained for around five years, whilst Ho (74) has spent around three and a half years in pre-trial detention.
The Tiananmen Square crackdown took place on 4 June 1989, when the Chinese army intervened against the student-led protests in the capital. The exact number of victims has never been clarified, but it is estimated that thousands of people died.
For decades, the Alliance had organised a large torchlight vigil in Victoria Park to commemorate the victims. The vigils were banned in 2020, officially due to health restrictions during the pandemic, and again the following year. The organisation subsequently voted to disband in September 2021.
In giving their reasons for the sentences, the judges acknowledged that the case “did not involve violence or the threat of violence” and that the defendants had not presented “any specific means of implementation or timetable” for bringing an end to the one-party system in mainland China. Nevertheless, the court still ruled that the offence was “of a serious nature”, placing the three defendants within the most severe penalty bracket provided for under the National Security Law, which stipulates sentences of up to 10 years for this offence.
The judges maintain that they did not apply the law retroactively, attributing the convictions to pro-democracy statements made after it came into force. However, in a clearly contrived move to impose harsher penalties for what were merely opinions expressed on social media, they deemed the broader social context to be relevant “as part of the overall picture of the case”. Among the factors considered were the public dissemination of the Alliance’s programme, its organised activities, the Tiananmen vigils and the organisation’s presence on social media. The judges also emphasised that the defendants’ activities had lasted for up to 14 months and that they possessed a certain capacity for mobilisation and influence within the city. “Despite the conviction that their agenda might violate the Constitution and the National Security Law, they stubbornly persisted in their conduct,” the judges wrote, arguing that it had been “premeditated”.
During last month’s sentencing hearing, Chow Hang-tung had stated that a conviction under the National Security Law amounted to claiming that “pursuing democracy is a crime”. And in a written statement she was not permitted to read, she explained that she felt neither guilt nor remorse and that she wished to “remain steadfastly true to her convictions”. Yesterday, in a new post published on Patreon, the lawyer revealed that – as “evidence for the trial” – the judges had also seized all the books and the archive of documents relating to the Tiananmen Square massacre held by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.
Lee and Ho’s lawyers had requested that the lowest possible penalty be imposed, emphasising the absence of violence, a concrete operational plan and a timeline for achieving the alleged objectives.
