Hong Kong, Aug 21. (dpa/GNA) – A court in Hong Kong has convicted two pro-democracy activists and former co-organizers of an annual candlelight vigil commemorating, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
The judges found it proven that Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, along with their organization, incited the subversion of state power between July 2020 and September 2021. Sentencing has yet to be announced.
Under the national security law imposed by Beijing on the Chinese special administrative region, the man and the woman face up to 10 years in prison. Lee and Chow had pleaded not guilty. A third defendant, Albert Ho, had pleaded guilty.
The judges said the defendants called for an “end to one-party dictatorship.” The verdict stated that in doing so, they sought to challenge the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s governing authority.
For years, the Hong Kong Alliance, in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, organized the annual candlelight vigil to commemorate the victims of the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen protests in Beijing on June 4, 1989.
It was the only public commemoration on Chinese soil. The vigils were an expression of the political freedoms Beijing promised the former British crown colony, following its handover to China.
On the Chinese mainland, the events of June 4 are censored and appear neither in the media nor in official history books. The vigil has no longer taken place since the introduction of the national security law in 2020, in response to intense protests in Hong Kong.
GNA