Hong Kong jails Tiananmen vigil organisers for up to seven years and three months
Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho were sentenced on 11 September under the 2020 national security law. The Alliance that ran the 4 June vigil was fined HK$1.5 million.
Hong Kong2 min read
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A Hong Kong court on Friday, 11 September, sentenced three former leaders of the group that organised the city's annual Tiananmen vigil. Chow Hang-tung, 41, a lawyer, received seven years and three months. Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, a labour organiser, received seven years. Albert Ho, 74, a lawyer and former legislator, received five years and two months after pleading guilty in January. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China was fined HK$1.5 million.
Chow and Lee were convicted in August of inciting others to subvert state power under the national security law Beijing imposed on the city in 2020. They had faced up to ten years. A panel of three judges picked by the chief executive to hear national security cases found that the Alliance's long-standing call to "end one-party dictatorship" amounted to incitement to undermine the Communist Party. The judges noted that the case involved no violence and that the group never set a method or a timetable.
What the vigil was
For more than thirty years the Alliance held a candlelight gathering in Victoria Park on 4 June. Organisers put some crowds above 100,000. Police counts were lower. It was the only large, public commemoration of the 1989 Beijing crackdown permitted on Chinese soil. The last legal vigil was in 2019. The Alliance later disbanded. The three defendants were charged in 2021.
Chow told the court in May that the law itself was on trial. Lee has spent most of the years since the 2019 protests in custody on overlapping cases. Ho was a founder of the Democratic Party, which dissolved last year. Taiwan's government called the sentences a punishment of people who pursued democracy and said that was not a crime. The court applied the statute as written in 2020.
Why the date still matters
The sentences close one of the last high-profile national security trials left on the Hong Kong list. They also close, in law, the argument that remembering 4 June in public was a protected civic act. The judges treated the slogan as the offence. The vigil was the venue in which that slogan was spoken each year.
Hong Kong now has no licensed 4 June gathering and three of the people who ran it will be in prison into the 2030s. That is the legal fact. The historical fact is unchanged: the crackdown happened, the vigil happened, and for three decades the city was the place in China where both could be said out loud on the same night.
