By Chris Lau, CNN
Hong Kong (CNN) — Three key organizers behind what used to be the only large-scale public commemoration for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on Chinese soil will spend years in prison for inciting subversion in Hong Kong after judges handed down their sentence on Friday.
Their imprisonment is the latest chapter in Beijing’s yearslong national security crackdown in Hong Kong underscoring the risks that now exist in the once outspoken city in commemorating the victims of a bloody event Chinese officials have spent decades trying to erase.
The trio were key figures from a group that organized an annual vigil in Hong Kong that marked the moments when the ruling Chinese Communist Party sent in tanks to violently quell peaceful, student-led democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The yearly gathering was a symbolic ritual that drew huge crowds and starkly differentiated the financial hub from the rest of mainland China.
On Friday, West Kowloon Court sentenced Chow Hang-tung, a prominent young human rights lawyer to seven years and three months in prison, and former opposition lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan to seven years in prison. They were found guilty last month.
A third activist, veteran pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho – who pleaded guilty for a lighter sentence, an increasingly common strategy for those facing national security charges – received a five years and two months prison term.
The group that used to organize the vigil – the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China – was also fined HK$1.5 million ($191,300).
Before Friday’s sentencing, Chow posted a statement on her Patreon page saying her guilty verdict declared that “pursuing democracy is a crime.”
“If doing so makes me a criminal for life – if the law truly cannot accommodate our beliefs – then I would rather be a criminal than a person who betrays their conscience,” she wrote.
Hong Kong’s position as a once-outspoken corner of China has been upended in recent years by a national security law Beijing imposed following huge and often violent democracy protests that convulsed the city in 2019.
The erasure of the city’s annual candle-light Tiananmen vigil is one of the most visible examples of the ensuing crackdown, which critics, human rights groups and multiple Western nations – including the United States – say has quashed dissent and ended the city’s unique freedoms.
Beijing and the Hong Kong government say the national security laws were needed to return the city to order and stability.
“The HKSAR Government strongly condemns any biased remarks and smears against the HKSAR’s effort for safeguarding national security,” a government spokesperson said in response to a CNN inquiry when the trio were first convicted, using Hong Kong’s official title, adding rights and freedoms are protected under the national security law.
‘They cannot extinguish memory’
Chinese troops cracked down on pro-democracy protesters around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. No official death toll has ever been released, but estimates range from several hundred to thousands, with many more injured. The subject remains widely censored inside China.
Following the events of 1989, mourners would converge on the same day every year in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district, to attend a vigil that filled multiple soccer pitches in the neighborhood’s Victoria Park with candlelight, calling for greater democracy for China.
It was a tradition that continued after Hong Kong’s 1997 handover by Britain to China, alongside frequent street protests and a political system that allowed pro-democracy lawmakers to stand.
That tradition came to an end with the imposition of a series of new national security offenses in 2020, with civil groups disbanded, some independent media outlets forced to shut down, and most activists jailed or living in exile.
But prosecutors said, and judges agreed, that the campaigns by the vigil organizers – including calls for an end to “one-party dictatorship” – amounted to an incitement to subversion.
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee – a former security chief – welcomed the verdict. “Their conspiracy was abundantly clear, which must be brought to justice,” he said last month.
But human rights groups and multiple foreign nations – including the United States – condemned their conviction.
Retiree Simon Ng, who had attended the Tiananmen vigils for decades, said he came to court on Friday with with a heavy heart, because a peaceful act of speech had now been made illegal.
“Hundreds of thousands of people had attended them in the past. This is an accusation against all of them,” he told CNN.
Zhou Fengsuo, a former student leader at the Tiananmen Square protests who now has US citizenship, told CNN the verdict showed “how profoundly Hong Kong has changed.”
“Authorities can extinguish the candles in Victoria Park, but they cannot extinguish the memory of June 4,” he added.
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