Hong Kong top court quashes conviction of Tiananmen vigil activists

HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s top court ruled in favour of three Tiananmen vigil organisers on Thursday, quashing the activists’ prison terms over their refusal to submit information to national security police.

The judgment is a stinging rebuke to the government, which has targeted dissent using expansive powers under a national security law imposed by Beijing after Hong Kong’s huge pro-democracy protests in 2019.

The law can be used to demand information from alleged “foreign agents” and authorities used that power in 2021 on the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance, which organised vigils to mark Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown before those events were banned.

Three group leaders — Chow Hang-tung, Tang Ngok-kwan and Tsui Hon-kwong — were jailed, each for four and a half months, after they refused.

But five top judges on Thursday sided with the trio and said the prosecution “made it impossible for them to have a fair trial”.

“The court unanimously allows the appeals,” Chief Justice Andrew Cheung said.

Tang, who had finished serving his prison term, said the ruling was a vindication of his group and urged people not to forget the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown.

“This is hugely gratifying for those who support the Alliance and its volunteers,” he told reporters.

Prosecutors argued that the security law required people to hand over information when the police chief “reasonably believed” they were foreign agents, without needing to prove it in court.

But top judges said that was a misreading of the law and the police ought to have proven that the Alliance was in fact a foreign agent when issuing the demand.

“There was no attempt at offering such proof,” they wrote.

Redacted evidence

Judges also blasted prosecutors for heavily redacting evidence that purported to show the Alliance’s overseas links, leaving “pages often completely covered in black ink”.

“The striking feature of the exhibits is that a very large part of each document was redacted,” they wrote.

Hong Kong used to be the only place on Chinese soil where people could publicly mourn the deadly clampdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, but commemorations have gone underground in recent years.

Hong Kong has arrested 320 people for national security crimes and convicted 161 of them as of March 1.

Defendant Chow, a lawyer-turned-activist, remains behind bars awaiting trial in a separate subversion trial which could land her in jail for life.

In a separate ruling on Thursday, the same Hong Kong court ruled against activist Tam Tak-chi over a colonial-era sedition offence.

Tam, who is serving a jail sentence of more than three years, argued that prosecutors needed to prove he intended to incite violence.

Last year, Hong Kong authorities revamped the offence so it explicitly states that people can be convicted of sedition even if no intent to incite public disorder or violence was proven.