Media mogul Jimmy Lai, founder of Apple Daily, is leaving the Court of Final Appeal by prison van in Hong Kong, China on Feb. 9, 2021. REUTERS / Tyrone Siu
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai and nine other pro-democracy activists are expected to be sentenced Friday after being found guilty of participating in unauthorized meetings during anti-government protests in 2019.
It would be the first time that Lai, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent Democratic activists, who has been in prison since December after being denied bail in a separate national security investigation, will be sentenced.
About 100 people, including foreign diplomats, queued early in court on Friday to take a seat for the hearing.
Lai was previously found guilty in two separate trials in April for illegal meetings held on August 18 and 31, 2019, respectively. The maximum possible sentence is five years in prison.
His repeated arrests have drawn criticism from Western governments and international rights groups, who expressed concern about declining freedoms in the global financial center, including freedom of expression and assembly.
In the August 18 case, court judge Amanda Woodcock found him guilty along with Martin Lee, who helped create the city’s largest opposition party in the 1990s and often became the former’s ‘father of democracy’. British colony is mentioned.
When he entered the court on Friday, Lee said, “I feel completely relaxed, I am ready to face my sentence.”
The other defendants, also found guilty, included 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 last two had pleaded guilty.
In her softening speech, Ng said the law should be defended not only in courts or the legislature, but also on the streets.
“When the people, in the last resort, had to collectively express their fear and urge the government to respond, protected only by their expectation that the government will respect their rights, I must be ready to stand behind them, join them 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 August 31 clashes were some of the worst in Hong Kong, with police firing tear gas and water cannons at pro-democracy protesters dropping gasoline bombs.
All three had pleaded guilty.
Lee Cheuk-yan posted on Facebook late Thursday that he expected to go to jail, but his mind was “free as the ocean and the sky.”
The 2019 pro-democracy protests were spurred by Beijing’s growing pressure on the broad freedoms promised to Hong Kong upon its return to Chinese rule in 1997, plunging the semi-autonomous city into its greatest crisis since the handover.
Beijing has since consolidated its authoritarian hold on Hong Kong by imposing a sweeping national security law, punishing anything it sees as secession, subversion, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces to life in prison.
Proponents of the law say it has restored stability.
Lai, founder of the Apple Daily tabloid, is a frequent visitor to Washington, where he met officials such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to rally support for democracy in Hong Kong, prompting Beijing to call him a “traitor.”
Lai is scheduled for two more court mentions on Friday, in the ongoing trial accusing him of collusion with a foreign country and a fraud case involving the lease of the building that houses Apple Daily.
Earlier this week, the tabloid published a handwritten letter that Lai sent from prison to his colleagues, 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 get its way through us, we fulfill our responsibility. “
It’s “time we got up,” he wrote.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Principles of Trust.