A Hong Kong court has jailed two former leaders of a group that organised annual Tiananmen vigils, sentencing Lee Cheuk-yan to seven years and Chow Hang-tung to seven years and three months for inciting subversion.
The pair were convicted under the national security law imposed by Beijing after mass pro-democracy protests in 2019. They had pleaded not guilty and have been in custody since 2021.
Lee, 69, was the former chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, while Chow, 41, served as its vice-chairwoman. The now-disbanded alliance organised candlelit commemorations of the 1989 crackdown in Beijing for more than three decades.
The court highlighted the group’s long-standing call to “end one-party dictatorship” in its political activities. Prosecutors argued that the phrase challenged the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party under Article 1 of China’s constitution.
Judges rejected arguments that the defendants had believed they were acting within Hong Kong’s traditional protections for freedom of speech and assembly. Public commemorations of the Tiananmen crackdown, once tolerated in the city, were effectively outlawed after the national security law came into force in 2020.
Albert Ho, another former alliance chairman and former leader of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, pleaded guilty in January. He was sentenced to five years and two months in prison.
The Hong Kong Alliance was fined HK$1.5 million, equivalent to about £145,000. The organisation had dissolved in 2021 after police demanded information about its operations and finances.
Human Rights Watch said the sentences punished the activists for carrying out peaceful democratic activities and breached their rights to freedom of expression and assembly. The Hong Kong office of China’s foreign ministry has defended the case, saying that no one should engage in unlawful activity under the guise of free speech or freedom of the press.
