Patrick Lam, left, and Chung Pui-kuen leave court during the hearing on charges of conspiring to publish seditious publications, in Hong Kong, in this June 27, 2023, file photo.Tyrone Siu/Reuters
When Chung Pui-kuen founded the media outlet Stand News, he meant the name literally.
It was 2014, and media in his native Hong Kong was coming under increasing pressure to self-censor as Beijing stepped up control over the territory, but Mr. Chung was determined his publication would take a stand on issues that were important, most of all freedom of speech itself.
“From day one, 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.”
On Thursday, Mr. Chung was sentenced to 21 months in prison for sedition, after he and his co-defendant, Stand News editor Patrick Lam, became the first journalists convicted of the crime since Hong Kong’s handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997. Mr. Lam, who is suffering from a severe kidney disease, was sentenced to time served, having spent 10 months in pre-trial detention.
Mr. Chung will likely spend around nine months in prison. His sentence was close to the 24-month maximum allowed by the colonial-era legislation under which he was charged, but if the two men were prosecuted today, their sentences could have been a lot longer: A tough new 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 Freedoms 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.
Mr. Chung and Mr. Lam’s conviction, the group said, “falls 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 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.
Justice Kwok Wai-kin said Stand News had become “a tool to smear and vilify the Central Authorities and the [Hong Kong] Government,” and 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.”
Mr. Chung and Mr. Lam’s sentencing comes amid a host of recent sedition rulings under the new law, including the jailing of one 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.
One of the most high-profile cases involving the media, the prosecution of former Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai, is currently on hiatus, due in part to the large backlog of cases Hong Kong’s handpicked bench of national security judges have to get through. Mr. Lai, 76, is expected to begin testifying in his defence in November, more than four years after he was first arrested.
Speaking to The Globe and Mail, Mr. Lai’s son Sebastien said his father was in increasingly poor health, which he blamed partially on his being kept in solitary confinement for long stretches. At times, the elder Mr. Lai has been too sick to attend court.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher, a member of Mr. Lai’s international legal team, said that keeping someone of Mr. Lai’s age and medical condition — he is a diabetic — in solitary confinement for extended periods “poses a very serious risk to his life.”
Ms. Gallagher’s team recently appealed to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, on the grounds of his confinement and alleged denial of independent medical care. In response, the Hong Kong government accused Mr. Lai’s lawyers of abusing UN mechanisms and attempting “to scandalize the Hong Kong National Security Law and the judicial system.”
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 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 and Mail — continue to maintain a presence in Hong Kong, the situation has become tenser 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, upbraided 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,” Huang said. “It gives the outside world the impression that both [the] 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.”
That’s what Mr. Chung said he always felt he was doing. Even after the passage of a draconian national security law in 2020 and raids on Apple Daily, he told the court last year, Stand News kept publishing because “I believed my colleagues and I, from start to finish, had done nothing wrong.”
