2 pro-democracy activists convicted in Hong Kong, face up to 10 years in jail: Most unjust

Hong Kong’s High Court on Friday 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, ‌69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, 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).The judgment issued by three government-approved national security judges ​said it was the defendants’ repeated if peaceful use of the phrase “end one-party dictatorship” rather than other ⁠political actions or beliefs that had breached the law.The defendants “intended to cause others to lose confidence in the CCP by stirring up ​hostility and causing division, so as to achieve the objective of undermining the fundamental basic system,” the judges stated in a 16-page ​ruling summary, referring to China’s ruling Communist Party.“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 and were seen as a symbol of the Asian financial hub’s relative ​freedom compared to mainland China.They were effectively outlawed in 2020 with the enactment of the National Security Law.Prosecutors had argued that the primacy of ‌the Communist ⁠Party was enshrined in article 1 of the Chinese constitution.

Defence submissions that the defendants genuinely believed they were acting within the law given Hong Kong’s freedoms of speech were rejected by the...