Media mogul Jimmy Lai, founder of Apple Daily, leaves court for final appeal by jail in Hong Kong, China on February 9, 2021. REUTERS / Tyrone Siu
Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai and nine other pro-democracy activists are expected to be sentenced on Friday after being convicted of participating in unauthorized meetings during protests against the government in 2019.
This would be the first time that Lai, one of Hong Kong’s leading democratic activists, who has been in prison since December after being denied bail in a separate national security trial, will receive a sentence.
About 100 people, including foreign diplomats, lined up outside the court early Friday to get a seat for the trial.
Earlier in April, Lai was convicted in two separate trials of illegal gatherings on August 18 and August 31, 2019. The maximum sentence is five years imprisonment.
His repeated arrests have drawn criticism from Western governments and international rights groups, who have expressed concern about declining freedoms in the global financial center, including freedom of speech and assembly.
In the case on August 18, District Court Judge Amanda Woodcock found him guilty along with Martin Lee, who helped launch the city’s largest opposition Democratic Party in the 1990s, and the former British colony became ‘father of democracy’. named.
When he entered court on Friday, Lee said: “I feel completely relaxed, I am ready to resign my sentence.”
The other defendants, who were also convicted, include prominent lawyer Margaret Ng and veteran Democrats Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho, Leung Kwok-hung, Cyd Ho, Au Nok-hin and Leung Yiu-chung. The latter two pleaded guilty.
In her mitigating speech, Ng said the law should not only be defended in courts or the legislature, but also on the street.
“When the people in the last resort had to give collective expression to their anxiety and urge the government to respond, protected only by their expectation that the government would respect their rights, I must be willing to stand with them, with them. stand up and stand up for them, ‘she said.
In the second trial, the same judge found Lai and Lee Cheuk-yan guilty along with Yeung Sum. The clashes on August 31 were among the worst in Hong Kong, with police firing tear gas and water cannons at pro-democracy protesters throwing petrol bombs.
All three pleaded guilty.
Lee Cheuk-yan posted on Facebook late Thursday that he expects to go to jail, but that his mind is ‘as free as the ocean and the sky’.
The protest democracy in 2019 was spurred by the increasing pressure on Beijing on the great freedoms promised to Hong Kong with its return to the Chinese government in 1997, and plunged the semi-autonomous city into its biggest crisis since the handover.
Beijing has since consolidated its authoritarian grip on Hong Kong by imposing a comprehensive national security law and punishing anything it considers secession, undermining, terrorism or conspiracy with foreign powers to life in prison.
Supporters of the law say it has restored stability.
Lai, founder of the Apple Daily tabloid, was a regular visitor to Washington, and met officials such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to garner support for democracy in Hong Kong, which Beijing asked him to do. to call a ‘traitor’.
Lai is scheduled for two more court stories on Friday, in the ongoing trial where he is charged with collusion with a foreign country and a fraud case related to the rent of the building in which Apple Daily is.
Earlier this week, the tabloid newspaper published a handwritten letter that Lai sent to his colleagues from prison, saying: ‘It is our responsibility as journalists to seek justice. As long as we are not blinded by unjust temptations, as long as we do not. let evil come through us, we fulfill our responsibility. ‘
It is ‘time for us to stand still’, he wrote.
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