Hong Kong jails Tiananmen vigil organisers for up to seven years and three months

A Hong Kong High Court panel sitting at the West Kowloon Magistrates' Courts sentenced three former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China on Friday for inciting others to subvert state power. Chow Hang-tung, 41, a lawyer, received seven years and three months. Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, a labour organiser and the group's former chairman, received seven years. Albert Ho Chun-yan, 74, a lawyer and former chairman of the Democratic Party, who pleaded guilty in January, received five years and two months. The Alliance itself was fined HK$1.5 million, payable within three months.

The charge covered 1 July 2020 to 8 September 2021, the first stretch of the national security law Beijing imposed on the city in 2020. Lee and Chow denied the charge and were convicted last month. Ho admitted it before trial. Three designated judges sat without a jury, as the security law requires. Where circumstances are judged serious, the statute sets a band of five to ten years. Chow and Lee were placed in the upper part of that band. Ho stayed above five years but lower than the other two because he pleaded guilty.

The judges treated the Alliance's old slogan, end one-party dictatorship, as incitement to undermine the Communist Party. For three decades the group had organised the 4 June vigil in Victoria Park, the only large public commemoration of the 1989 Beijing crackdown that Chinese authorities allowed on Chinese soil. Those gatherings stopped after 2020. The Alliance disbanded. Friday's sentences close one of the last high-profile security trials still on the list.

Lee's wife, labour organiser Elizabeth Tang, said outside court that she could not imagine another three years and that he would appeal. Chow had told the court in May that the law itself was on trial. Speaking to the BBC before her 2022 arrest, she said she was prepared to be detained. The three had been charged in 2021 and faced up to ten years.

Hong Kong once sold itself as the place where mainland taboos could still be named in public. The vigil was the clearest annual proof. After the security law, organisers, newspapers, unions and parties that used that language have been dismantled, prosecuted or pushed into exile. Ho's Democratic Party disbanded last year. The court summary from August said Lee and Chow had incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power.

The fine on the dissolved Alliance is a bookkeeping close as much as a penalty. The group no longer exists as a legal person that can raise money in the city. Paying HK$1.5 million within three months will fall on whatever assets remain or on individuals the court can reach.

Appeals will run in a court system that now answers to the same security frame. The practical effect of Friday is that the three people most identified with the vigil will stay in custody into the early 2030s unless a higher court cuts the terms. For residents who still mark 4 June in private, the sentence is a reminder that the public form of that memory has a prison term attached.

Foreign governments that used to send diplomats to Victoria Park on 4 June have already shifted to statements. The sentences will add another round of those statements. They will not put the vigil back on the park's football pitches. The legal question the court answered is narrower: whether a slogan that was printed on leaflets for thirty years now counts as subversion when spoken after 30 June 2020. The panel said it does.