A 27-year-old man faces up to several years in jail for sedition, after pleading guilty to wearing a protest T-shirt that prosecutors say flouts Hong Kong’s new national security law.
Chu Kai-pong (諸啟邦) had already served a three-month prison term for sedition in January for wearing and keeping in his luggage clothes and flags with protest slogans.
Yesterday, he pleaded guilty to one count of “doing acts with seditious intent,” leading to the territory’s first conviction under the new tougher law.
File photo: grab from FB
One of the slogans on the T-shirt, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” had been found to be “capable of inciting secession” in a separate court case.
Chu was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the offending slogan and a yellow mask printed with “FDNOL” — the shorthand of another slogan “five demands, not one less” — on June 12 — a date associated with the huge and sometimes violent democracy protests in 2019.
Chu told police he believed the slogan called for the return of Hong Kong to British rule, the court heard, and he chose the outfit to remind the public of the 2019 protests when the phrase was widely used by pro-democracy demonstrators.
Photo: Reuters
Convicting Chu following his guilty plea, chief magistrate Victor So (蘇惠德) added that two other offenses of failing to produce an ID card and loitering were dropped.
Chu, who has been in custody for three months, is to be sentenced on Thursday.
Hong Kong enacted a tougher national security law in March, the second legislation of its kind following the one imposed by Beijing in the middle of 2020 afterb quashing the protests.
The revised law beefed up the offense of sedition — a colonial-era offense — to include inciting hatred of China’s communist leadership and upped its maximum jail sentence from two years to seven.
It also punishes five categories of crimes: treason, insurrection, sabotage, espionage and external interference.
Chu’s lawyer argued that the maximum he could be given would be two years. Sedition was created under British colonial rule, which ended in 1997, and was seldom used until Hong Kong authorities revived it in 2020 and charged more than 50 people and four companies.
Critics, including Western nations such as the US, say the new security law would further erode freedoms and silence dissent in Hong Kong.
However, authorities defended the law as necessary to fulfill a “constitutional responsibility,” comparing it to a “reliable lock to prevent someone from breaking into [our] home.”
As of last month, 301 people had been arrested under the two security laws, with 176 prosecuted and 157 convicted.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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