Hong Kong’s highest court on Monday rejected an appeal from seven high-profile democracy activists, including Jimmy Lai, who has been in prison for participating in illegal protests in the Chinese territory.
A lower court had overturned the conviction but a bench of five judges sitting on the Court of Final Appeal upheld the initial verdict, the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN) reported. The court dismissed arguments that called into question whether the conviction was proportionate to fundamental human rights protections, UCAN said.
Lai, whose pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily was shut down by the Chinese government in 2021, has spent three years in solitary confinement.
“Lai was wrongfully detained on December 31, 2020, on charges under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law (NSL),” said a 2023 letter to President Biden from the Washington, DC-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
Lai, 76 and a Catholic convert, and the other defendants were arrested following an August 2019 pro-democracy rally that drew an estimated 1.7 million people.
Born in Guangzhou, China, on December 8, 1947, Lai escaped from communist China at the age of 12, slipping into the then-British territory of Hong Kong as a stowaway on a boat. He worked in a garment factory for the equivalent of $8 a month, but eventually rose to the position of factory manager.
In 1975, he had enough assets to purchase a bankrupt garment factory, where he began producing sweaters. Customers included J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, and other U.S. retailers. Out of this developed the Asia-wide retailer Giordano.
Trying to save democracy
He turned his attention to media and politics in the 1990s, however, as Great Britain was preparing to hand over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. The 1989 Tiananmen Square incident especially prompted Lai’s advocacy of democracy and criticism of the Beijing government. He began publishing Next Magazine and Apple Daily, which had a circulation of 400,000 by 1997. Lai said he hoped the newspaper would help maintain freedom of speech in Hong Kong.
On February 28, 2020, Lai was arrested for illegal assembly during his attendance in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. While awaiting trial, he was among 15 high-profile democracy figures arrested on April 18, 2020, on suspicion of organizing, publicizing or taking part in several unauthorized assemblies between August and October 2019.
On June 30, 2020, China’s parliament by-passed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council to enact the Hong Kong national security law. Before the law was enacted, Lai called it “a death knell for Hong Kong” and alleged that it would destroy the territory’s rule of law.
One of the crimes specified by the law was “collusion with foreign forces,” and on August 10, 2020, Lai was arrested for this new “crime.” The same day, about 200 Hong Kong police officers raided the offices of Apple Daily, seizing around 25 boxes of materials. The bank HSBC took steps to freeze Lai’s bank account.
The main evidence for the charges of collusion consisted of statements Lai had made on Twitter. He was accused of using the social media site, now known as X, and other media to request foreign sanctions against Hong Kong and mainland Chinese officials.
While awaiting trial, he was convicted on April 1, 2021, on the “unlawful assembly” charge from the 2019 protests. He was sentenced to 14 months in prison. He continued to receive sentences for similar illegal assemblies and involvement in candlelight vigils on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
In August 2022, Lai pleaded not guilty to the charges related to “collusion with foreign forces.” He was disallowed from using a British lawyer. In December of that year he was convicted on a separate fraud case and sentenced to five years and nine months.
Last year, Lai and the other six activists partially won their appeal at a lower court, with their convictions of organizing an unauthorized assembly suppressed. But their convictions over taking part in the assembly were upheld, and they continued their legal battle at the city’s top court, The Associated Press reported. On Monday, they lost that appeal.
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