2 Editors Guilty in Landmark Hong Kong Case

It's another big blow to press freedom in the territory
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Aug 29, 2024 4:26 AM CDT
2 Journalists Convicted in Landmark Hong Kong Trial
A worker carrying some containers walks past police officers during a raid on the office of Stand News during a raid in Hong Kong, Dec. 29, 2021.   (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, File)

A Hong Kong court convicted two former editors of a shuttered news outlet on Thursday, in a case widely seen as a barometer for the future of media freedom in the city once hailed as a bastion of free press in Asia. Stand News former editor-in-chief Chung Pui-kuen and former acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam were arrested in December 2021. They pleaded not guilty to the charge of conspiracy to publish and reproduce seditious publications, the AP reports. Their sedition trial was Hong Kong's first involving media since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Stand News was one of the city's last media outlets that openly criticized the government amid a crackdown on dissent that followed massive pro-democracy protests in 2019. It was shut down just months after the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, whose jailed founder Jimmy Lai is fighting collusion charges under a sweeping national security law enacted in 2020. Chung and Lam were charged under a colonial-era sedition law that has been used increasingly to crush dissidents. They face up to two years in prison.

District Court Judge Kwok Wai-kin ruled that 11 of the 17 articles prosecutors based their case on had "seditious intent," defined as inciting hatred against the Hong Kong government or China's central government, NBC News reports. The articles included stories featuring pro-democracy ex-lawmakers Nathan Law and Ted Hui and interviews with three participants in a primary election organized by the pro-democracy camp in 2020.

  • Chung previously denied that Stand News was a political platform, and emphasized the importance of freedom of speech during the trial. "Freedom of speech should not be restricted on the grounds of eradicating dangerous ideas, but rather it should be used to eradicate dangerous ideas," he said.
  • "This verdict will have an important impact on every newsroom in the city, as the judgement somewhat clarifies where the red lines are," Tom Grundy, editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong Free Press, said in a post on X. Every newspaper in Hong Kong, he wrote, "will have to consider who's writing op-eds for them, & what they're writing."
(More Hong Kong stories.)

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