Monday, the Wan Chai District Court sentenced eight activists to prison sentences for their participation in the vigil of Tiananmen ‘s remembrance of June 4, 2020, which had been banned for sanitary reasons.
Jimmy Lai, the founder of the Apple Daily, the most popular Prévobe Diary of Hong Kong buried by the police in June, the former journalist Gwyneth Ho, 31, who is committed to politics during the movement. protest of 2019, and the human rights lawyer Chow Hang-tung, 36, Vice-President of the Hong Kong Alliance, were sentenced on Monday, December 13, in respectively 13, 12 and 6 months of Prison firm.
They were the only one, among the twenty activists incriminated for the “illegal assembly” of June 4, 2020, to have chosen to plead not guilty. They are all the three also pursued under the new National Security Act, imposed in June 2020 by Beijing with the aim of criminalizing any form of political dissent in the special administrative region. Hong Kong’s other heavyweights of the Hong Kong opposition have also been sentenced to 9 to 14 months in prison, the heaviest ranging in Lee Chuk – former member of the Labor Party and Long President of the Alliance (” Alliance in support of the patriotic and democratic movements of China “, the movement that has always organized the vigils of June 4th). About fifteen activists already convicted at the beginning of the year for the same vigil were inflicted sentences ranging from six to ten months of imprisonment, some suspended.
The judgment of 24 pages of the district court of Wan Chai which summarizes the facts in the trial of Jimmy Lai establishes that an authorization had been requested from April 23 by the Alliance so that the vigil could be held, as Every year, in the same place, on the football fields of Victoria Park, and on the same date, in the evening of June 4th. This vigil that has always been in the greatest dignity is one of the most important dates of the Hongkong calendar. For every June 4 evening, since 1989, Hong Kong played a very conscientiously his role as a torch of the memory; Conscious of being the only city in China to have freedoms allowing him to commemorate the dead openly whose exact number is unknown, fallen around the Tiananmen Square of Beijing, during the bloody repression of the People’s Class. which puts a term for months of student mobilization claiming democratic reforms in China.
Legal fierce
But the 1 e June 2020, for the first time in thirty years, the Hong Kong police had informed the Alliance that the requested license was refused for sanitary reasons, in the full pandemic of COVID-19. The authorization was again refused in 2021, on the same reason. Prosecutors criticized the defendants of having come together at 6:30 pm, around the fountain at the entrance of the park, having lit candles and shouted some slogans, reminiscent of the broad protest movement of 2019 (who had started in opposition to an extradition law but quickly mutated into broader anti-government disputes).
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