A Hong Kong court on Friday sentenced a student to two months imprisonment for sedition over pro-independence social media posts she published while studying in Japan.
This is the first known Hong Konger convicted under the colonial-era sedition law over online speech in Japan.
Scholars and overseas activists say this case represents an alarming escalation of the chilling effect experienced by those who continue to engage with Hong Kong affairs.
Photo: AFP
Hong Kong Chief Magistrate Victor So (蘇惠德) sentenced the student to two months in jail after her guilty plea, saying deterrent sentencing was needed because “ignorant people would be incited subtly.”
Mika Yuen, 23, pleaded guilty to sedition late last month for 13 pro-Hong Kong independence social media posts on Facebook and Instagram shared from September 2018 to March this year.
According to the prosecutor, most of the posts were published when she was studying in Japan, with messages saying: “I am a Hong Konger; I advocate for Hong Kong independence,” and “Hong Kong independence, the only way out.”
Among the 13 alleged social media posts, only two posts were shared from Hong Kong.
She was arrested in March after returning to the city to renew her identity card.
The defense had earlier disputed whether the magistrate’s court had extraterritorial jurisdiction over the posts she published abroad, but they abandoned the dispute as Yuen did not remove the content.
Sedition is punishable by a maximum jail term of two years upon conviction. It is not among the offenses criminalized by the Beijing-imposed National Security Law, but it has been ruled by the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal as an act that can endanger national security.
In related news, a US bill was introduced on Thursday calling for sanctions against 49 Hong Kong officials, judges and prosecutors involved in national security legal cases.
The Hong Kong Sanctions Act is a bipartisan bid by US congresspeople in the US House of Representatives and the Senate. It would require the US president to determine whether the Hong Kong officials named in it qualify for sanctions under existing US legislation, including the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019.
Officials named in the bill include Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Paul Lam (林定國), Committee for Safeguarding National Security secretary-general Sonny Au (區志光), Police Commissioner Raymond Siu Chak-yee (蕭澤頤), Chief Justice Andrew Cheung (張舉能) and High Court Judge Esther Toh (杜麗冰).
In response, Hong Kong on Friday condemned the move, saying US legislators were grandstanding and trying to intimidate the city.
A city government spokesperson said that US politicians should stop acting against international law and norms of international relations and stop interfering in Hong Kong matters, which were “purely China’s internal affairs.”
Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020 after months of pro-democracy protests.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has