Criticizing laws or chanting anti-government slogans can be enough to jail someone for sedition in Hong Kong, an appeal court ruled yesterday in a landmark case brought under a colonial-era law increasingly used to crush dissent.
Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal upheld a 40-month sentence for democracy advocate Tam Tak-chi (譚得志), the first person tried under the territory’s sedition law since Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Tam’s lawyers had argued that his conviction should be overturned because the prosecution did not show that he meant to incite violence.
Photo: AP
The prosecution is widely seen as part of Beijing’s clampdown on dissent in the former British colony, following widespread protests against the government in 2019.
Tam was convicted on 11 charges in 2022, including seven counts of “uttering seditious words.”
A judge at the lower court took issue with him chanting the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” — words that the government says imply separatism — and criticizing the Beijing-imposed National Security Law during a primary campaign.
The judge said Tam’s words broke the law because they incited discontent against Hong Kong and disobedience to the law.
Tam and his lawyers had drawn hope from a ruling made by a top Commonwealth court in a case last year about a similar law.
In that case, the London-based Privy Council said that the sedition law in Trinidad and Tobago could not be used to convict people unless they intended to incite violence or disorder.
The Privy Council is the court of final appeal for a number of Commonwealth countries.
However, the Hong Kong court rejected the argument, finding that the Privy Council ruling only applied to the law in Trinidad and Tobago.
Judge Jeremy Poon (潘兆初) said that sedition in Hong Kong is a statutory offense, not a common-law offense.
The legislative history of the law made it clear that an intention to incite violence is not a necessary element of most sedition offenses, Poon said.
“Nothing suggests that any individual, including the applicant, a politician and activist highly critical of the government and a stern opponent of government policy, would be subject to an unacceptably harsh burden because of the restriction on seditious acts or speeches imposed by the offense,” he said.
To effectively respond to seditious acts endangering national security, seditious intent has to be “broadly framed to encompass a myriad of situations” that may arise at different times, he said.
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