A Tiananmen activist yesterday told a Hong Kong court that she “totally embraced” actions the prosecution deemed crimes, as closing arguments in her national security trial entered their second day.
Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), 41, is standing trial for “incitement to subversion” along with her former colleague Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人), 69. They face years behind bars if convicted.
The pair were leaders of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance, a group that used to organize candlelight vigils to mark China’s deadly 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. China imposed a National Security Law on the territory in 2020, and the alliance’s leaders were charged the following year and have been behind bars since.
Photo: AFP
Chow, a Cambridge-educated barrister who is representing herself, smiled widely at supporters in the gallery as she entered the courtroom.
Standing in front of a three-judge panel, she said it was a “weird” criminal case, because the defendants did not dispute the facts.
“The defendants fully embraced the actions that the prosecution alleged to be crimes,” Chow told the court, adding that their efforts were an expression of their beliefs.
Photo: AFP
“What is really at dispute is what the law suppresses and what it protects,” she said.
In their closing arguments on Monday, prosecutors accused Chow and Lee of “endangering national security in the name of human rights,” adding that freedom of speech and association are “not absolute rights.”
They said the alliance had repeatedly called to “end one-party rule” in China, which they said amounted to overthrowing or undermining the political system established by the Chinese constitution.
Chow said the group’s stance of “end one-party rule” means “to put an end to a state of unrestrained power.” The Chinese constitution “exists to restrain those in power, not to restrain ordinary people,” she told the court.
“The constitution itself is a tool ... to put an end to various forms of autocracy,” she said, adding that the prosecution’s allegations that the group incited people to contravene the constitution were “completely absurd.”
Lee’s lawyer on Monday said the court must not pay “lip service” to human rights, adding that the right to criticize state organs is protected by China’s constitution.
Lee, who sat quietly in the dock in yesterday’s hearing, had previously denied that “end one-party rule” means overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership.
He hoped the party would reform to grant Chinese citizens “the civic rights and happiness they deserved,” Lee told the court in March.
Lee and Chow face a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment.
A third defendant, 74-year-old former lawmaker Albert Ho (何俊仁), pleaded guilty in January.
Rights groups have slammed the trial. Amnesty International deputy regional director Sarah Brooks said in a statement on Monday that “the prosecution’s case relies on vague, overly broad and arbitrary definitions of ‘subversion’” and called for the charges to be dropped.
Urania Chiu, a law lecturer researching Hong Kong at Oxford Brookes University, said the verdict could have wider consequences.
“If the prosecution’s broad and circular understanding of the offense is accepted [by the court], legitimate critiques of Chinese government policies ... however minor, will easily be criminalized,” she said.
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