Chung Pui-kuen, the former chief editor of Hong Kong's now shuttered pro-democracy news outlet Stand News, arrives at the district court in Hong Kong on Sept. 26.ISAAC LAWRENCE/AFP/Getty Images
The former editor-in-chief of a shuttered Hong Kong pro-democracy news outlet was sentenced to 21 months in prison for sedition, weeks after he and a co-defendant became the first journalists convicted of the crime since the territory’s handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
Chung Pui-Kuen, who was also the founder of Stand News, which ceased operations three years ago, will likely spend about another nine months in prison. His sentence Thursday was close to the 24-month maximum allowed by the colonial-era legislation under which he was charged.
Co-defendant Patrick Lam, former acting editor-in-chief of the news outlet, who is suffering from severe kidney disease, was sentenced to time served. He has spent 10 months in pretrial detention.
However, if the two men were prosecuted today, their sentences could have been a lot longer: A tough national-security law adopted in March increased the maximum penalty for sedition to 10 years.
Their case has been widely criticized by press organizations, human-rights groups and foreign governments as indicative of the shrinking space for journalists in Hong Kong today. In a statement, 25 members of the Media Freedom Coalition, including Canada, Britain and the United States, said they were “gravely concerned” by the verdict and the “wider suppression of media freedom” in the territory.
The convictions of Mr. Chung and Mr. Lam, the group said, fall “against a wider backdrop of increased media self-censorship and the hostility by Hong Kong authorities against local and foreign journalists.”
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong said in a statement that the case had sent “shockwaves through Hong Kong newsrooms, as well as international news organizations with bureaus in the city.” In particular, many journalists in Hong Kong have been alarmed at how the trial judge found articles merely quoting government critics to be seditious, along with op-eds written by pro-democracy activists, some of whom are now in exile.
When Mr. Chung founded Stand News in 2014, it was clear that the name had a literal meaning.
At the time, media in his native Hong Kong were coming under increasing pressure to self-censor as Beijing stepped up control over the territory. But Mr. Chung was determined that his publication would take a stand on issues that were important, most of all freedom of speech itself.
“From Day 1, if you had asked me what our guiding principle was, I would have said it was to protect freedom of speech,” Mr. Chung said last year. “I would not ask myself why I should publish something, instead I would ask why I should not.”
The sentencing of the two men took place amid a host of recent sedition rulings under the new law, including the jailing of a man for 10 months for scrawling graffiti on a bus seat, and another for 18 months for wearing a T-shirt with a slogan of the 2019 protest movement.
In the case against Mr. Chung and Mr. Lam, Justice Kwok Wai-kin said Stand News had become “a tool to smear and vilify” central authorities and the Hong Kong government. He accused the outlet of exercising an “extremely huge influence” during anti-government unrest in 2019, when freedom of speech had to be balanced against the “surrounding circumstances” and risk of being the “spark that explodes a powder magazine.”
One of the most high-profile cases involving the media, the prosecution of former Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai, is on hiatus, in part because of the large backlog of cases that Hong Kong’s hand-picked bench of national-security judges have to get through.
The 76-year-old Mr. Lai is expected to begin testifying in his defence in November, more than four years after he was first arrested.
Mr. Lai’s son, Sebastien, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail that his father was in increasingly poor health, which he blamed partially on solitary confinement for long stretches. At times, the elder Mr. Lai has been too sick to attend court.
While Mr. Lai has regularly appeared in court during his marathon trial, no photos are allowed. One of the few glimpses the public has had of the media mogul since his arrest was in photos taken of him by Associated Press photographer Louise Delmotte, using a long lens from a hill near Stanley Prison, where he is housed.
Earlier this year, Ms. Delmotte was refused a routine visa renewal without explanation, her employer said this week, and forced to leave Hong Kong.
Iris Wu, China representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, described the move as a “petty act of retaliation” and expressed concern that it was becoming a pattern in Hong Kong as in China, where foreign media are routinely denied visas or expelled for critical coverage.
While many international media organizations – including The Globe – continue to maintain a presence in Hong Kong, the situation has become more tense in recent years, and the government has taken an increasingly aggressive line in rebutting what it sees as unfair reporting.
On Wednesday, the authorities dismissed a new report by Human Rights Watch on shrinking academic freedom in the territory as full of “fabricated content and irresponsible remarks.”
Speaking the same day at an event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Huang Jingrui, a Hong Kong-based spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, scolded journalists for telling “one-sided stories.”
“If you check the Western media, whenever it mentions Hong Kong, 90 per cent of the time it’s about national-security cases,” Mr. Huang said. “It gives the outside world the impression that both mainland and Hong Kong have become a state or region of surveillance … but it’s totally wrong.”
He said there was still press freedom in Hong Kong, but you “have to work within the law.”