A Hong Kong court yesterday began hearing appeals from 12 democracy campaigners jailed for subversion last year during the territory’s largest national security trial.
They were among 45 opposition figures, including some of Hong Kong’s best-known democracy activists, who were sentenced in November over a 2020 informal primary election that authorities deemed a subversive plot.
Critics, including the US, Britain and the EU, said the case showed how a Beijing-imposed National Security Law has eroded freedoms and quashed peaceful opposition in Hong Kong.
Photo: EPA
Former Hong Kong lawmakers “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung (梁國雄), Lam Cheuk-ting (林卓廷), Helena Wong (黃碧雲) and Raymond Chan (陳志全) are among those contesting their convictions and sentences in hearings that are scheduled to last 10 days.
Owen Chow (鄒家成), a 28-year-old activist who was sentenced to seven years and nine months in jail — the harshest penalty among the dozen — has also lodged an appeal.
Former district councilor Michael Pang (彭卓棋) withdrew his appeal application yesterday morning, leaving a total of 12 appellants.
Some of them have already spent more than four years behind bars.
The activists were accused of organizing or taking part in an unofficial primary election that aimed to improve the pro-democracy camp’s chances of winning a majority in the Legislative Council. They had hoped, once a majority was secured, to force the government to accede to demands such as universal suffrage by threatening to indiscriminately veto the budget — a plan that trial judges said would have caused a “constitutional crisis.”
Defense lawyer Erik Shum (沈士文) said that vetoing the budget was a form of “check and balance” built into Hong Kong’s mini-constitution that lawmakers could deploy as a last resort.
“In order to check the unpopular exercise of powers by the executive, one of the important measures is to tie the purse,” he told the court.
Shum said lawmakers should not be answerable to the courts over how they vote because of the separation of powers.
“Let politics remain in [the legislature] and let the public decide, not the judges,” he said.
Prosecutors also challenged the acquittal of lawyer Lawrence Lau (劉偉聰), one of two people found not guilty in May last year from an original group of 47 accused.
Lau’s “overall conduct” showed that he was party to the conspiracy and he should be tried again, because the lower court made the wrong factual finding, the prosecution said.
Lau, representing himself, said the trial court’s findings should not be “casually interfered” with.
“I have never advocated for the resignation of the chief executive, I have never advocated the indiscriminate vetoing of the financial budget,” Lau told the court, referring to core tenets of the alleged conspiracy.
Beijing has remolded Hong Kong in its authoritarian image after imposing a sweeping National Security Law in 2020 following months of huge, and sometimes violent, pro-democracy demonstrations.
Authorities arrested figures from a broad cross-section of the opposition in morning raids in 2021, the group later being dubbed the “Hong Kong 47.”
Aged between 27 and 69, they included democratically elected lawmakers and district councilors, as well as unionists, academics and others ranging from modest reformists to radical localists.
Dozens of police officers were deployed outside the West Kowloon court building yesterday morning as people queued to attend the hearing.
“They made a sacrifice... I hope they understand that Hongkongers have not forgotten them,” a public hospital worker in his 30s surnamed Chow said.
Amnesty International’s China director Sarah Brooks said the appeal would be a “pivotal test” for free expression in Hong Kong.
“Only by overturning these convictions can Hong Kong’s courts begin to restore the city’s global standing as a place where rights are respected and where people are allowed to peacefully express their views without fear of arrest,” Brooks said.
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