Veteran Hong Kong democrats found guilty in landmark unlawful assembly case

By Jessie Pang and James Pomfret

HONG KONG (Reuters) – A Hong Kong court found seven prominent democrats guilty of unauthorized assembly charges, including 82-year-old barrister Martin Lee and media tycoon Jimmy Lai, 72, the latest blow to the city’s beleaguered democracy movement.

Lee, who helped launch the city’s largest opposition Democratic Party in the 1990’s and is often called the former British colony’s “father of democracy,” was accused of taking part in an unauthorized assembly on Aug. 18, 2019.

The silver-haired Lee and the others, all in their 60’s or older, sat impassively as district court judge Amanda Woodcock handed down her decision.

“I have found after trial the prosecution able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that all of the defendants together organized what amounted to an unauthorized assembly,” the district court judge said in the full written judgement.

They were also found guilty of knowingly participating in an unauthorized assembly.

Although Hong Kong’s mini-constitution guarantees the right to peaceful assembly, Woodcock added, “restrictions are imposed, including those for preserving public safety and public order, and protecting the rights of others.”

Sentencing will come on April 16, with some legal experts expecting jail terms of 12 to 18 months. The maximum possible sentence is five years.

The other defendants included prominent barrister Margaret Ng, 73; and veteran democrats Lee Cheuk-yan, 64; Albert Ho, 69; Leung Kwok-hung, 65; and Cyd Ho, 66. Two others, Au Nok-hin and Leung Yiu-chung, 67, had earlier pleaded guilty.

A small group of supporters displayed banners outside the West Kowloon court building, including one that read “Oppose Political Persecution”.

“If we are sentenced to jail in the future for this case … it’s our badge of honor to be jailed for walking with the people of Hong Kong,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, a former lawmaker who has been a pro-democracy activist since the late 1970’s.

The judge rejected a request by the prosecution to keep the nine in custody, and granted them bail pending sentencing.

During the trial, defense lawyers argued that freedom of assembly is a constitutional right in Hong Kong, and noted that police had approved the peaceful demonstration in the city’s downtown Victoria Park, which grew into an unauthorized march as numbers swelled into the hundreds of thousands.

The prosecution argued that the freedom of assembly isn’t absolute in Hong Kong.

Critics, including Western governments, have condemned the arrests of Lee and other democrats amid the ongoing crackdown. Forty-seven other high-profile democratic campaigners are facing subversion charges under the national security law, and have mostly been denied bail and are being held in detention.

The European Union office in Hong Kong said the ongoing prosecutions of democrats are of “great concern” and it would continue to monitor developments.

The United States said on Wednesday that Hong Kong does not warrant preferential treatment under the Hong Kong Policy Act, a law that had allowed Washington to maintain a special relationship with the city.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a news release that China had “severely undermined the rights and freedoms of people in Hong Kong,” through arbitrary arrests and politically motivated prosecutions as well as “pressure on judicial independence and academic and press freedoms.”

The 2019 pro-democracy protests were spurred by Beijing’s tightening squeeze on wide-ranging freedoms promised to Hong Kong upon its return to Chinese rule in 1997, and plunged the semi-autonomous city into its biggest crisis since the handover.

Beijing has since imposed a sweeping national security law, punishing anything it deems as secession, subversion, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces with up to life in prison.

Since the law’s promulgation, the government has sought to crush the opposition movement, barred protests and curbed political expression, and overhauled the city’s electoral system to ensure only pro-China “patriots” govern Hong Kong.

Hong Kong and Chinese authorities, however, say the security law and electoral reforms are needed to restore stability and to resolve “deep-seated” problems, and that human rights will be safeguarded.

(Reporting by Jessie Pang and James Pomfret; Editing by Gerry Doyle and Jonathan Oatis)

After mass arrests at protests, Moscow jail space in short supply

By Maria Tsvetkova

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Anti-Kremlin protester Filipp Kuznetsov was detained in Moscow on Saturday and found guilty by a court on Monday of taking part in an illegal protest. But it was only late on Wednesday that the authorities were able to find a jail cell for him.

After arresting what one monitoring group said was a record number of protesters at weekend rallies demanding Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny be freed from jail, Moscow police appear to be struggling to find enough space in detention facilities.

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Russia on Saturday to demand the release of Navalny, who was arrested at a Moscow airport this month after flying home for the first time since being poisoned with a nerve agent.

Kuznetsov, a 28-year-old entrepreneur, was arrested on Saturday near the prison housing Navalny. A court on Monday sentenced Kuznetsov to 10 days in jail for taking part in the protests, deemed illegal because they had not been pre-sanctioned by the authorities.

“I’m sitting in a police bus because there is no space in the jails,” Kuznetsov told Reuters by phone on Wednesday afternoon.

He said he knew Moscow’s jails were full from policemen who had guarded him and 17 other protesters in a police bus overnight outside a jail that had refused to accept them because it was full.

Kuznetsov messaged later on Wednesday to say the police had eventually found a prison for him after driving from jail to jail for more than 16 hours.

The policemen guarding him and the others had allowed volunteers to bring food while they were waiting in the bus and had sometimes escorted them to the nearby jail to use the bathroom, Kuznetsov said.

By the time he got to jail, he said he had not slept for over 30 hours.

“Free people don’t get tired. We support each other,” he said.

The Moscow police department did not respond to a request for comment.

MASS ARRESTS

The OVD-info protest monitoring group, which counts arrests one by one and offers legal support, said police on Saturday detained nearly 4,000 people at protests across Russia, over 1,500 of them in Moscow.

It said it had compared the figures with the number of arrests counted at previous protests, and found both were record figures for President Vladimir Putin’s long rule.

“The number of people arrested after the rallies was really big and there is no space for them in Moscow jails,” said Grigory Durnovo, an OVD-info analyst.

Putin has called the pro-Navalny marches illegal. Kremlin critics cite their constitutional right to protest.

(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova and Mikhail Antonov, Editing by Andrew Osborn and Timothy Heritage)