Free the HK 47! Free Jimmy Lai!

The Hong Kong-based tycoon Jimmy Lai has pleaded not guilty to two charges of colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security, and publishing seditious material in Apple Daily, the tabloid newspaper he founded, in his trial which began on 18 December.

This is an extraordinary delay, well over three years (1084 days) after he was first arrested for collusion on 10 August 2020 under the National Security Law. Lai is currently serving a five year sentence for fraud (accommodating a consultancy firm inside Apple/Next Media HQ without informing the landlord), and had already served an 12 month sentence for unlawful assembly and got another 13 month sentence in Dec 2021 for organising and inciting others to take part in the banned 2020 Tiananmen vigil.

The offence of sedition has been revived and used as a broad sweeping charge against many Hong Kong protesters, alongside unlawful assembly and rioting, all part of Hong Kong’s Common Law heritage as a former British colony, such as the ban in October 2019 against protesters wearing masks which stemmed from the Emergency Regulation Ordinance enacted to attack the Hong Kong Seamen’s strike in 1922.

Prosecution and sentencing data since 2019 analysed by Georgetown Law School clearly showed the justice system in Hong Kong used as a political weapon to punish and intimidate protesters — lengthy remands in custody, denial of bail, use of no-jury magistrate courts, high level of successful prosecutions and severity of sentencing.

Furthermore, the authorities had been issuing $HK1M bounties for overseas exiles to be brought back to Hong Kong. Most recently, two more leading dissidents, Agnes Chow and Tony Chung, have escaped from Hong Kong and are claiming political asylum in Canada and UK respectively.

The hearing of evidence for the Hong Kong 47, who organized an unofficial primary election, closed on 4 December, and verdicts are due in “three or four months”.

There is no doubt that the authorities consider Lai to be one of the key leaders orchestrating against the CCP over many years. Lai’s attempts to hire a UK barrister to defend him has been blocked by Beijing’s “interpretation” of the National Security Law, stating that the HKSAR government had the right to disallow the use of non-Hong Kong based barristers in National Security court cases. The UK, US and other western governments have called upon the Hong Kong government to release Lai, who is a UK citizen.

Lai is stridently anti-CCP and a prominent backer of the pan-democrats in Hong Kong, but also a billionaire media tycoon. Socialists and trade unionists have no truck with his business empire and his support for Trump in the 2020 USA elections. His media publications are often a thorn in the side of the Hong Kong government and business establishment, and regularly attack the Chinese Communist Party, but also misogynistic sensationalist tabloids like the Sun and the old News of the World.

The previous convictions against him and these latest trumped up charges are aimed to silence him and all critics of the CCP. The shutting down of Apple Daily and the harassment of journalists is a vicious attack on the freedom of the press.

We should demand that the charges of sedition and colluding with foreign forces against him are dropped. We are against all sedition, public order and national security charges, not just against Lai but all others involved in the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong.

The focus of our concern is the labour movement activists and socialists like Carol Ng (former Chair of disbanded HK Confederation of Trade Unions and former British Airways Cabin Crew Union activist), Leung Kwok Hung (leader of the League of Social Democrats), Lee Cheuk Yen (general secretary of the HKCTU), Winnie Yu (founder of the Hospital Authority Employee Alliance) and Elizabeth Tang (former general secretary of HKCTU and current general secretary of International Domestic Workers Federation), but maverick tycoons as well as ordinary citizens should have civil liberties — rights to free speech, assembly and association, as well as the freedom to travel.