More than an hour before the verdict on former Stand News editors Chung Pui-Kuen and Patrick Lam was due to begin, all the seats for the press and the public were occupied and an overflow courtroom was filling up.
Judge Kwok Wai-kin kept everyone waiting for an extra hour, during which some of the defendants’ friends and supporters speculated about the outcome of a case that has become a test of press freedom and judicial independence in Hong Kong.
Chung and Lam were the first journalists to be charged under the British colonial-era law since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997. The last time anyone could recall the law being used against the press was in 1952 when a pro-Beijing paper was prosecuted for publishing a report critical of the British authorities’ response to a fire.
Few of Chung and Lam’s supporters expected them to be acquitted because almost everyone charged with an offence related to national security in Hong Kong since 2020 has been convicted. But some held out a glimmer of hope, buoyed by the news a few minutes before the hearing began that a jury in another court had acquitted six pro-democracy activists charged with terrorist offences.
When the judge took his place wearing the wig and gown customary in many other common law jurisdictions, he immediately snuffed out all the hope left in the courtroom. Chung and Lam were guilty of conspiracy to publish seditious articles, as was Stand News itself.
Beyond the verdict Kwok’s judgment articulated a definition of sedition so expansive that it could prohibit the publication of almost anything hostile to the Hong Kong government and the authorities in Beijing. Not only was it not necessary for the offending article to incite violence, it did not even have to represent an actual risk to national security.
The verdict will have a chilling effect on the already embattled and financially precarious handful of independent news organisations that remain in Hong Kong, and recent legislation has increased the penalty for sedition to seven years in prison. But there are still journalists in Hong Kong, many of them young and at the start of their careers, who share the view of the trade expressed by Lam in his mitigation letter to the judge.
“Journalists are not only responsible for their own reporting, but they are also derelict in their responsibility if they deliberately avoid reporting despite knowing that the public has a right to know,” he said. “For this reason the only way for journalists to defend press freedom is to report, just like everyone who is still working hard today. And I’m just one person in the industry who happens to be the defendant.”
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