Hong Kong’s High Court yesterday convicted two pro-democracy activists of inciting subversion, highlighting their use of the phrase “end one-party dictatorship” in their political activities.
Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人) and Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤) were part of a group known for organizing annual vigils marking Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Lee and Chow, the former chair and former vice-chair of a now-disbanded group, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, could be sentenced to as much as 10 years in jail under a China-imposed National Security Law (NSL).
Photo: AP
It was the defendants’ repeated use of the phrase “end one-party dictatorship” rather than other political actions or beliefs that had breached the law, the judges said.
“[The defendants] intended to cause others to lose confidence in the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] by stirring up hostility and causing division, so as to achieve the objective of undermining the fundamental basic system,” the judges said. “Even though they believed and envisaged that the acts of resistance may not necessarily involve the use of violence or threat of violence, those acts would be in breach of the NSL, and carry a risk of long-term imprisonment.”
Public commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests used to be legal and tolerated in Hong Kong, but were effectively outlawed in 2020 with the enactment of the National Security Law.
Prosecutors said the primacy of the CCP was enshrined in Article 1 of the Chinese constitution.
Defense submissions that the defendants genuinely believed they were acting within the law given Hong Kong’s freedoms of speech were rejected by the judges.
“They just refused to pull back from the brink and were bent on embracing the resistance line of the Alliance to the very end,” the judges said.
Lee and Chow, who have been detained since 2021, had pleaded not guilty to the charge.
Former group chairman Albert Ho (何俊仁), who was also a former chairman of the city’s largest opposition Democratic Party, pleaded guilty to the same charge.
Mitigation hearings for Lee and Chow are to start this month.
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