A Hong Kong court on Saturday sentenced five speech therapists to 19 months in prison over children’s books deemed divisive, in a case that rights advocates say is a major blow to free speech amid a tightening of civil liberties in the Chinese territory.
On Wednesday, Lorie Lai, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Marco Fong were found guilty of “conspiracy to print, publish, distribute, display and/or reproduce extremist publications”.
Judge WK Kwok called the defendants’ actions a “brainwashing exercise to guide very young children to accept their views and values, namely (Beijing) does not have sovereignty over (Hong Kong).”
Yeung told the court on Saturday that her “only regret was that she had not published more picture books before her arrest,” according to court documents.
The charges center around a set of books that tell the stories of a sheep village resisting a pack of wolves that invaded their home — a story that prosecutors claimed was intended to provoke contempt for the local government and China’s central government in Beijing. .
In one book, wolves tried to take over a village and eat the sheep, in another, 12 sheep are forced to leave their village after being targeted by wolves, which the court believed referred to the case where 12 Hong Kong activists they tried to flee the city to Taiwan as fugitives, but were intercepted by Chinese law enforcement.
In a ruling on Wednesday, a Hong Kong District Court judge sided with the prosecution, ruling that the images had an association with events in the city and finding that the authors intended to “incite hatred or contempt or cause discontent”. against local and central government or both.
“By identifying the government (of the People’s Republic of China) as wolves… children will be led to believe that (the PRC government) is coming to Hong Kong with the evil intention of taking their home and destroying their happy life without right to do so at all,” Judge Kwok Wai Kin wrote in a 67-page document outlining his thinking on the verdict.
“The book publishers clearly refuse to acknowledge that (China) has resumed exercising sovereignty over (Hong Kong),” Kwok wrote in his ruling, referring to the transfer of Hong Kong, a former British colony, to Chinese rule in 1997.
The case has become a proxy for looming questions about the limits of freedom of expression in the city, amid a greater crackdown on civil liberties as part of Beijing’s response to widespread, months-long anti-government protests in 2019.
Those protests, which were sparked in response to a proposed bill that could see Hong Kongers tried for crimes across the border, morphed into a larger pro-democracy movement that was also linked to popular concern about growing influence of Beijing in the semi-autonomous city.
The defense for the accused, who were all executive board members of the now-defunct Hong Kong General Association of Speech-Language Therapists, had argued that the charges brought against them were unconstitutional as they were inconsistent with the freedoms of expression protected under Hong Kong law .
But Kwok, who is also one of a small group of judges selected by the city leader to hear cases related to national security, rejected that challenge, saying instead that limited restrictions on freedom of expression were necessary for the protection of national security and public order.
In a document outlining the reasons for the guilty verdict, Kwok disputed that the books were merely myths promoting universal values, another argument raised by the defense, pointing to a preface in one of the books that referred to a “movement against legislation’ in 2019 and the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ mechanism governing Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland.
The case became public after their arrest when police accused the group in a tweet of “glorifying the illegal acts of protesters” and “glorifying the fugitives who fled,” with officials expressing specific concerns given that the public -the target was children. Beijing and local leaders have sought to encourage national pride in Hong Kong’s youth, including by strengthening national education in local curricula.
The verdict was met with an outcry from rights advocates. Human Rights Watch in a statement accused the Hong Kong government of using the “too broad” sedition law “to punish trivial speech offences”.
“People in Hong Kong used to read about the senseless persecution of people in mainland China for writing political allegories, but this is now happening in Hong Kong,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Hong Kong authorities should reverse this dramatic decline in freedoms and overturn the convictions of the five children’s book authors.”
In July, the United Nations Human Rights Commission also called on Hong Kong to repeal the colonial-era Sedition Law, saying it was concerned about its use to limit “citizens’ legitimate right to freedom of speech.”
In a response, the government said the use of the law was “not intended to silence the expression of any opinion that is only genuine criticism of the government based on objective facts.”
The law, part of a 1938 crime ordinance that had not been used for decades, was revived alongside Beijing’s introduction of a national security law in Hong Kong in 2020 that targets secession, subversion, collusion with foreign forces and terrorist activities – with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. In prison.
Last year, a court ruled that parts of the original sedition law that referred to the monarch could be turned into references to the central or Hong Kong government. The conviction carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison.
Other recent cases include the sentencing of a 75-year-old activist to nine months in prison for planning to protest the Beijing Winter Olympics earlier this year. Last month, two men were arrested on suspicion of breaking the law in connection with a Facebook group they were said to be running.
