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A Hong Kong court on Thursday sentenced a former editor of the now-defunct Stand News to 21 months in prison in a sedition case, making him the first journalist to be jailed under the colonial-era law since the erstwhile British possession was returned to China 27 years ago.
Chung Pui-kuen has already served some 11 months of his sentence in pre-trial detention. The sedition law allows for a maximum imprisonment of two years.
Patrick Lam, a former acting editor of Stand News, was sentenced along with Mr Chung but was released immediately on account of a serious immune system condition. His lawyers had told the court that Mr Lam’s kidney function was less than 30 per cent and “any mistakes or delay in treatment could endanger his life”.
Mr Lam’s wife, seated in the gallery alongside diplomats from the US, UK and EU, burst into tears as the judge ordered his release.
Mr Chung waved at his family members and colleagues in the courtroom as many shouted “take care” and “see you later”, reported Hong Kong Press Free Journal.
The journalists, arrested on 29 December 2021 after police raided their newsroom, were sentenced almost a month after they were found guilty of “a conspiracy to publish and reproduce” articles with seditious intentions.
They had been charged under rarely used colonial-era sedition laws, rather than the controversial 2020 national security law. They pleaded not guilty.
In its ruling, the court dismissed the defence argument that the journalists had unintentionally fallen foul of the law and accused them of siding with the protesters who ground Hong Kong to a halt in 2019.
Since Stand News had a mass following, it said, the seditious articles caused serious harm to Hong Kong and, by extension, China.
The court said the defendants “were not engaged in genuine media work but were instead participating in the so-called resistance movement of that time”.
In its verdict delivered in August, the court said Stand News had become a tool for smearing the governments in Beijing and Hong Kong during the 2019 protests.
Mr Chung defended the work of Stand News. “The media should not self-censor but report,” he said. “Freedom of speech should not be restricted on the grounds of eradicating dangerous ideas, but rather it should be used to eradicate dangerous ideas.”
The court deemed at least 11 articles published in Stand News, most of them opinion pieces, to be seditious.
Stand News, an online news outlet founded in 2014, reported and wrote extensively on the 2019 protests and the government crackdown on them.
It was raided six months after Hong Kong’s government had shut down Apple Daily newspaper and arrested its owner Jimmy Lai. Mr Lai, accused of publishing seditious material, is set to take the stand to defend himself later this year after a court declined to drop the charges that could land him in jail for life.
