A 27-year-old man, Chu Kai-pong, has been sentenced to one year and two months in prison in Hong Kong after pleading guilty to sedition under the new security law for wearing a T-shirt with a protest slogan from the 2019 pro-democracy uprising.
Chu Kai-pong is the first person to be convicted under the Ordinance for Safeguarding National Security contained in Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law (the Constitution), which was passed by the city’s Legislative Council earlier this year and only promulgated on March 23, despite criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations, which variously called the law’s outlines “vague, broad and retrogressive.”
The man was arrested on June 12 while wearing a T-shirt that read: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” At the time of his arrest, Chu Kai-pong was also wearing a mask that read: “FDNOL,” an acronym for the English phrase: “five demands, not one less,” another slogan from the 2019 protests. For the authorities of the Chinese Special Administrative Region, the phrase on the T-shirt has secessionist connotations, which constitutes a crime under the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020.
Thus, on Monday, September 16, in West Kowloon Court, the defendant pleaded guilty to “committing, with seditious intent, an act having seditious intent,” under Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. Today, in his sentencing reasons, Judge Victor So ruled that the 27-year-old had “criminal intent” to “disturb the peace and stir up hatred against the Hong Kong government.”
The continuity of the crime, the judge explained, was only reduced by the prompt intervention of the police. During the trial hearings, it was established that Chu Kai-pong wore his shirt for only 25 minutes on June 12 before he was stopped by the authorities.
The court therefore sentenced the 27-year-old to 18 months in prison plus an additional 3 months for recidivism, as the man had already been convicted of sedition in January. Judge Victor So then reduced the 21-month sentence by a third to 14 months, due to the defendant’s guilty plea.
Under Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, which punishes the crimes of treason, insurrection, sabotage, external interference, sedition, theft of state secrets and espionage, the crime of sedition carries a penalty of seven years in prison, up to a maximum of 10 years in case of collusion with a “foreign power”.
Judicial repression has thus replaced truncheons. All the offences introduced by the new law are defined in a vague manner and are applicable to many non-violent activities carried out by the opposition, even to the clothes worn on the street, to posts published on social media or for some writings on a bus.
Today, in fact, the same West Kowloon Court in Hong Kong sentenced another man to 10 months in prison for writing a series of “seditious” graffiti on the seats of some buses in the city. The 29-year-old Chung Man-kit, who appeared today before Judge Victor So, pleaded guilty to three counts of “having committed, with seditious intent, an act which had seditious intent”, under Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law.
The man was arrested on June 23 on charges of having “written, on multiple occasions, words with seditious intent on the back of the seats of several public buses” between March 23 and April 21. These included the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” and others in favor of the city’s independence from China, including “Hong Kong independence, the only way out”.
