Two Hong Kong journalists have been found guilty on “sedition” charges for their involvement in the 2019 pro-democracy uprising that was initiated online and posed a danger to the authoritarian regimes of China and Hong Kong.
The journalists were editors in Hong Kong’s online non-profit newspaper, Stand News, which has now been defunct. The newspaper was founded in 2014 but it was not until 2019 that the website went viral among the masses during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that year.
This surge in popularity allowed Stand News to expand its operations, raking in large sums of money in donations and hiring over 60 employees.
However, the popularity stint did not last long, as the pro-China government of Hong Kong decided to quell the 2019 demonstrations by force and shut down the free media outlets.
The anti-media government operations saw the fall of many major outlets, including Apple Daily, which was owned by Hong Kong’s clothing business tycoon Jimmy Lai.
Reportedly, Stand News owners and chief editor Chung Pui-Kuen resisted the government and kept on publishing critical stories despite knowing that it could push them behind bars. The police eventually raided the Stand News offices in December 2021, seized their equipment, and arrested the staff.
Stand News owners decided to shut down its operations after the raid to get their employees released.
While many employees did not face strict punishments, its chief editor, Chung Pui-Kuen, and the once acting chief editor, Patrick Lam, were pushed into legal trouble where they have now been found guilty in the Hong Kong court.
Prosecutors accused them of publishing 17 articles that slammed the Chinese government, crushed their official narratives, and questioned the anti-democratic practices of the Hong Kong regime while also breaching the “national security law” that was introduced to curb the pro-democracy uprisings in 2020.
The court has now found that 11 of those articles were seditious, with some of them getting this tag just because they quoted people who were declared “traitors” by the Chinese communist government.
Meanwhile, the court dismissed the concerns of the editors’ legal team, which maintained that news stories also used to publish other sides of the story by quoting pro-government people.
According to the judge, it was surprising to see the citizens rising up against the government in 2019 and that media organizations like Stand News majorly tricked these people.
Lam, who did not attend the court hearing due to health issues, wrote a letter that his attorney read in the court. The letter stated that Lam was proud of working with a pro-democracy media organization that spoke for the powerless people and could not be influenced by the status quo.
They will be sentenced on September 26 and can face up to two years in prison.
