(Hong Kong) Hong Kong press mogul Jimmy Lai and two other pro-democracy activists were sentenced Thursday for attending a banned rally in 2020 to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Jimmy Lai, 74, owner of the now closed pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was convicted of illegal assembly alongside former journalist Gwyneth Ho and human rights lawyer Chow Hang-tung.
The district court found them guilty, among other things, of inciting and participating in an unauthorized assembly. The sentences will be pronounced Monday.
Authorities have indicted around 20 politicians and pro-democracy activists following a vigil last year in honor of victims of Beijing’s deadly crackdown in 1989.
Mr. Lai and his co-defendants, Chow Hang-tung and Gwyneth Ho, are the last to know their verdict, as they had pleaded not guilty.
In practice, these convictions make little difference, M. Lai, Mme Chow and Mme Ho are already behind bars like dozens of other activists, and face separate prosecutions under the strict National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong following protests two years ago.
For more than three decades, every June 4, tens of thousands of people gathered in Victoria Park, to participate in these vigils in commemoration of the bloody repression in 1989 of Tiananmen Square in China.
These rallies, during which slogans in favor of democracy in China were chanted, had become one of the symbols of the political freedoms enjoyed by the semi-autonomous territory.
This year Beijing has made it clear that it will no longer tolerate Tiananmen commemorations in Hong Kong or Macau, where it is possible to openly commemorate the events of 1989.
A few months ago, sixteen political leaders and activists, including Joshua Wong, the most famous face of the Hong Kong protest, were sentenced to six to ten months’ imprisonment for their participation in 2020 in this vigil, and a few received suspended sentences.