November 19, 2024 – The sentences handed down today to 45 courageous pro-democracy activists are a travesty of justice and another nail in the coffin for Hong Kong’s previously cherished status as a safe haven for the rule of law.
Those sentenced are among the Hong Kong 47 political prisoners arrested in January 2021 whose only crime was to participate in a democratic primary, to give Hong Kongers a say in who represented them in Legislative Council elections.
Gwyneth Ho, the former Stand News journalist, received seven years. Today she published as eloquent a recollection of her involvement in Hong Kong’s democracy movement as you could hope to read, calling the prosecution’s logic “comical” for equating an aim to secure a parliamentary majority with a conspiracy to subvert state power.
The time has come for the world to recognise how Hong Kong has changed. Global banking executives gathered in the city for a summit this week cannot pretend it is business as usual when these 45 political prisoners – academics, lawyers, journalists, and politicians – have been sentenced to a combined 245 years and six months in prison.
The CFHK Foundation calls for U.S. lawmakers to immediately respond by passing the HKETO Certification Act (H.R. 1103), which cleared the House of Representatives by a vote of 413-3, and deliver it to President Biden to sign into law. This will enable the swift shuttering of Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices, which function as an enabler of transnational repression directed at the Hong Kongers forced to seek safety overseas.
The below is a statement by Mark Clifford, Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation President:
“What we have seen today is not justice but political theatre. It would be a farce, or ‘comical’ as defendant Gwyneth Ho so eloquently said, except that it is a tragedy for those political prisoners who have been sentenced to almost 250 years in prison.”
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