Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal on Thursday overturned the convictions of jailed human rights lawyer Chow Hang-tung and two fellow organizers of a candlelit vigil for victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, although the three have already served their sentences.
The ruling was a rare legal upset for the government’s ongoing crackdown on dissent.
The court ruled unanimously that Chow, a former leader of the now-dissolved Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, and former alliance members Tang Ngok-kwan and Tsui Hon-kwong, hadn’t received a fair trial.
The ruling relates to charges of failing to hand over alliance documents to national security police, a requirement that only applies to “foreign agents.”
Chow, Tang and Tsui were jailed in 2023 for four-and-a-half months each for refusing to comply with the request.
The Court of Final Appeal cited the use of documents by the prosecution that were “heavily redacted” as a key plank in its decision.
“The Court held that in such circumstances the redactions were not only self-defeating by removing from evidence the only material relied upon for establishing that the [Alliance] were foreign agents, but also made it impossible for the Appellants to have a fair trial as they were deprived of all knowledge as to the nature of the prosecution’s case on an essential element of the offense,” the judgment said.
“Accordingly, the Court unanimously allowed the appeals, and quashed the convictions and sentences.”
‘Convincing reasons’
Chow made a V sign for “victory” in court after hearing the decision.
Former Alliance member Tang Ngok-kwan told reporters outside the court on Thursday that the ruling had proved that the Alliance was never a “foreign agent” as accused by police.
“Chow Hang-tung ... played a leading role in the process and put forward very convincing reasons to explain why the police’s request was an abuse of power, which made us more confident,” Tang said. “She was hugely important in bringing this about.”
“If we hadn’t persisted, we would have been forced to give in, and in the end, the Court of Final Appeal also checked and prevented this abuse of power,” he said.
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Overseas-based lawyer Kevin Yam said the police had acted “outrageously” in demanding the Alliance’s documents.
“The Hong Kong police went too far,” he said. “They were deliberately testing how far the National Security Law would allow them to go.”
He said the police actions hadn’t even met the standards of courts in mainland China, which are tasked with doing the bidding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
‘Crime’ of organizing a vigil
Chow remains behind bars pending a separate trial for “incitement to subversion” under the 2020 National Security Law, alongside two other former Alliance leaders, rights lawyer Albert Ho and labor unionist Lee Cheuk-yan.
“Their ‘crime’ is being the organisers of the large public annual vigil which was held in Hong Kong every year on 4 June from 1990 to 2020, to commemorate the victims of the Beijing Massacre on 4 June 1989,” former Hong Kong Bar Association Chairman Paul Harris wrote in a March 6 op-ed piece for the British legal paper The Counsel.
Harris criticized British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not stopping to listen when he tried to raise Chow’s case with him in 2024.
“This was a bad omen for the attitude of a new Labour government towards Hong Kong,” Harris wrote. “Since then my fears have been realised as I watched Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ trade promotion visit to Beijing in which Hong Kong seems to have been studiously ignored.”
Chow has been behind bars since 2021, when she was a recently engaged 36-year-old, with most of that time served in pretrial detention, he said.
“Like her co-defendants, she is detained simply for exercising the rights of free speech and freedom of assembly which were guaranteed to them by Britain and China in 1984, and which are exercised by everyone in the U.K. all the time,” he said.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated that her detention is arbitrary, and Amnesty International has recognized her as a prisoner of conscience, he added.
Setback for free speech
The Court of Final Appeal also ruled on Thursday in the sedition case of talk-show host and People Power activist Tam Tak-chi, the first Hong Kong person tried on a sedition charge since the city’s handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
Tam had appealed on the basis that free speech must be protected, and that incitement to violence must be proven in sedition cases, but the court rejected that argument on Thursday, upholding his conviction.
Tam, also known by his nickname Fast Beat, was found guilty on eight counts of sedition linked to slogans he either spoke or wrote between January and July 2020.
He is also being tried for “inciting an illegal assembly” and “disorderly conduct,” after he gave a number of public speeches calling for the “liberation” of Hong Kong, some of which were peppered with Cantonese swear-words.
Tam also stands accused of using the now-banned slogan of the 2019 protest movement -- “Free Hong Kong, revolution now!” -- and of saying that the authorities should “delay no more” in disbanding the police force, using a homonym for a Cantonese epithet involving the target’s mother.
Tam allegedly also shouted: “Down with the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party (CCP)!”
1938 law
In the sweeping colonial-era legislation under which Tam’s charges were brought, sedition is defined as any words that generate “hatred, contempt or dissatisfaction” with the government, or “encourage disaffection.”
The law was passed under British rule in 1938, and is widely regarded as illiberal and anti-free speech. However, by the turn of the century, it had lain dormant on the statute books for decades, until being resurrected for use against opposition politicians, activists, and participants in the 2019 protest movement.
The Court rejected Tam’s appeal on Thursday, in a move that the overseas-based Hong Kong Democracy Council said would have “wide-ranging implications” for future sedition cases in Hong Kong.
“It’ll allow the regime to continue to easily convict for sedition,” the Council said via its X account. “Up to now it has a 100% conviction rate ... The regime’s used sedition to throttle political speech.”
Kevin Yam said the decision had “set human rights protections in Hong Kong back 70 years, to the 1950s.”
“The chances of being found guilty ... are now much greater,” he said, in a reference to “sedition” charges.
Exiled former pro-democracy lawmaker Ted Hui, who is himself wanted by national security police, said the use of “sedition” charges was tantamount to a “literary inquisition” in Hong Kong.
“The door is wide open for the government to use sedition as political retaliation against anyone who says some embarrassing to the government, for example criticizing the budget for cutting bus concessions for the elderly,” Hui told RFA Mandarin.
“The court has made the threshold for sedition convictions very low indeed,” he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.