A Hong Kong court will begin handing down verdicts on Thursday in the city’s biggest national security trial, as authorities use sweeping powers imposed by Beijing to stifle political dissent in the Chinese territory.
The 47 pro-democracy activists and opposition leaders on trial, including former law professor Tai Guanqi and student group founder and protest leader Joshua Wong, face prison terms, even life, for allegedly staging primary elections to improve their chances of winning the citywide vote.
Most of the defendants had been detained for at least the past three years before and during the 118-day trial. On Thursday, a judge selected by Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leaders was scheduled to hand down the sentences for the 16 who have pleaded not guilty. The guilty defendants will be sentenced at a later date, along with 31 others who pleaded guilty.
The expected guilty verdicts and accompanying sentences will effectively turn a vanguard of the opposition, a symbol of the city’s once vibrant political climate, into a generation of political prisoners.
Some are former lawmakers who joined politics after Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997. Others are activists and lawmakers who have used more confrontational tactics to advocate for Hong Kong’s self-determination, including several students, like Mr. Wong, who rose to prominence as a bespectacled teenage activist and led massive street occupations calling for the right to vote in 2014.
“The message from the authorities is clear: any opposition, even moderate ones, will no longer be tolerated,” said Ho-hoon Hung, an expert on Hong Kong politics at Johns Hopkins University.
Most have sought to protect the rights of Hong Kong residents in the face of Beijing’s tightening control over the city. Public fears about Hong Kong’s curtailment of freedoms led to large-scale, sometimes violent, protests in 2019 and early 2020, posing the biggest challenge to Chinese authorities since 1989.
In response, China imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in 2020, giving authorities powerful tools to arrest critics en masse, including 47 pro-democracy activists on trial, including law professor Tai, a leading pro-democracy strategist, and Claudia Mo, a former lawmaker and veteran campaigner.
Authorities charged them with “conspiring to subvert the state” for attempting to organize or participate in unofficial primaries ahead of the 2020 vote for Legislative Council seats.
Professor Hung said that in the past, democracy activists have held primaries to choose candidates to run for mayor without any problems.
“The fact that they were arrested, convicted and jailed for such long periods before a verdict was issued indicates a fundamental change in Hong Kong’s political environment. Free elections, even the pretense of free elections, has disappeared,” Prof Hung said.
The case Hong Kong authorities have brought against the activists is complex and based largely on scenarios that never actually happened. Prosecutors say the unofficial primary elections were flawed because they were used by pro-democracy groups to gain a majority in the legislature. They accuse the activists of plotting to use that majority to “indiscriminately” veto government budgets and ultimately force Hong Kong’s then-leader to resign.
That election never took place, but the activists were arrested in 2021 and, after lengthy procedural delays, their trial finally began last February.
Of the 47 defendants, 31 pleaded guilty, including Wong, who has been serving time in prison since 2020 for other cases related to his activism. Four of the defendants – former assemblyman Au Nok-hin, former ward office workers Andrew Chiu and Beng Chun, and Mike Lam, a grocery chain owner with political ambitions – testified for the prosecution in exchange for reduced sentences.
The 16 defendants who pleaded not guilty include: The cast includes veteran activist Leung Kwok-wing, known as “Long Hair”, who promoted welfare policies for the elderly and the poor, corruption investigator turned lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting, and former journalist Gwyneth Ho.
Since their mass arrests, Hong Kong has all but eliminated dissent in its political institutions. Only approved “patriots” were allowed to run in Hong Kong’s 2021 legislative elections. And in March, at Beijing’s urging, Hong Kong passed its own national security law with unprecedented speed.
The new laws, collectively known as the Laws on Safeguarding National Security, criminalize broadly defined crimes such as “external interference” and “theft of state secrets” with penalties including life imprisonment. On Tuesday, the city detained six people under the new national security law for publishing “inflammatory materials” online. The arrests came just days before the 35th anniversary of China’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. One of those detained was activist Zhou Hangdong, an organizer of a group organizing rallies to commemorate the victims of Tiananmen.
Political cases are testing Hong Kong’s vaunted judicial independence, observers say. The trial of media mogul Jimmy Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, is underway, and a court just weeks ago upheld a government request to ban a popular protest song, raising concerns about freedom of speech.
In the trial of the 47 Democrats, prosecutors and defense lawyers have argued over whether nonviolent acts like the primary elections qualify as subversion, which the national security law defines as anyone who organizes or acts with “force, the threat of force, or other unlawful means.”
The defense argued that they were not committing any acts of violence and that the primary election was planned openly because they believed it did not violate any laws. Prosecutor Jonathan Mann argued that the language should be “broadly interpreted” to ensure its validity.
The drawn-out legal process and lengthy detention took a heavy personal toll on the defendants. Former legislator Ng Chih-wei lost both his parents in prison, and many of the defendants are parents with young children.
“Most of them have seen their lives put on hold. These are some of Hong Kong’s best and brightest people, but their careers have been cut short by spending months in prison,” Thomas Kellogg said., “It’s a really sad story,” said the executive director of Georgetown University’s Asian Law Center.
At a sentencing expected in the coming months, the 47 defendants will be classified in stages, legal scholars said. Those deemed “principal perpetrators” could be sentenced to between 10 years and life in prison. “Active perpetrators” could be sentenced to between three and 10 years in prison. Others convicted could receive up to three years in prison or unspecified “restrictions.”
Eva Pils, a law professor at King’s College London, said authorities would likely use the trial’s outcome to make an example of anyone who torments Beijing’s line, but she argued that the chilling effect of the trial would ultimately be to the government’s detriment.
“By creating more repression, more fear and more self-censorship, it’s denying Hong Kong people the opportunity to know how they really feel about the decision,” she said. “I think that’s part of what makes this case so important in Hong Kong history.”
