Eight Hong Kong activists jailed for up to a year and two months over June 4 vigil

Eight Hong Kong activists including Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and Lee Cheuk-yan have been sentenced to imprisonment of up to a year and two months for their participation in the June 4 vigil last year and inciting the public to join it.

The annual candle light vigil at Victoria Park, held annually by the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in memory of the crackdown in 1989, was banned for the first time last year.

Three of the defendants were convicted, including Lai, former vice-chairwoman of the Alliance Chow Hang-tung, and former journalist Gwyneth Ho Kwai-lam.

Five of them pleaded guilty to the charges, including Lee, the former chairman of the alliance, fellow members Richard Tsoi Yiu-cheong and Leung Kam-wai, and former lawmakers Leung Yiu-chung and Wu Chi-wai.

Lee received the heaviest sentence of 14 months, as he was involved in four related cases, his combined sentence is a year and eight months.

Lai was sentenced to 13 months, and will serve a combined term of one year and eight months.

Tsoi is jailed for a year, while Leung Yiu-chung is sentenced to nine months' imprisonment.

Chow, Leung Kam-wai, Ho and Wu were jailed for a year, nine months, six months, and four months and two weeks respectively.

District Court judge Amanda Woodcock said “deterrent” sentences have to be handed down as the defendants “belittled” a genuine public health threat, and the group “wrongly and arrogantly” believed that their commemoration of June 4 was more important than a serious health risk.

She also said protests had decreased considerably at the time of the banned vigil last year, but it had “not disappeared entirely”.

Woodcock added the Covid-19 pandemic which started in the beginning of last year, has “presented a different set of risk”. She also said the alliance could have turned the vigil to an online format but it had not, while the government’s social distancing measures were not to suppress gathering, but were aimed at preventing the spread of the virus and to protect the public.

Woodcock said the defendants encouraged other people to join the assembly but they could not ensure that participants would be peaceful and non-violent, and to comply with social distancing rules.

Although the assembly did not trigger an outbreak, their criminal liability was not reduced and the court had to hand down immediate imprisonment sentence.

Woodcock also said she would not consider the defendants’ political stances in sentencing, but said some of them are famous politicians and people would pay attention to their words and acts.

She said they also took up frontline roles in the unauthorized assembly, which making it an aggravating factor of sentence, as they, appeared together at the scene and supported each other, were easier to attract other people to join assembly.

Earlier in mitigation, Chow said what has been put on trial is perhaps the last candlelight vigil in Victoria Park for a long time to come, and definitely the last time that the Hong Kong Alliance could appear in Victoria Park on June 4 as the alliance has been “killed” by the government.

“It is a trial of this 31 years of tradition, this decades-long symbol of resistance that has been forcibly put to an end, first through the present prosecution, then continued through ever-escalating measures by the authorities,” she said.

She said the court should not have the delusion that the vigil was banned because of Covid-19.

“What happened here is instead one step in the systemic erasure of history, both of the Tiananmen Massacre and Hong Kong’s own history of civic resistance.”

She said by focusing on the health aspect, the court acts as if the parallel political crisis does not exist.

“A collective act of some 20,000 people has been branded as 'criminal,' yet their experience is irrelevant. History is irrelevant. Politics is irrelevant...The reality of political repression never stands a chance in court since no evidence of the kind would ever be admissible,” she said.

Chow said she believed the candle light will live on, and that she should be sentenced as one of those “people of conscience,” saying: “For when mass action is condemned, individual leniency is but a farce.”