“This trial is nothing but political persecution, a farce in every sense of the word,” said Dennis Kwok, lawyer and former member of the Civic Party in the Hong Kong Parliament (Legco) and leader of the opposition, about the river trial which opened on Monday, February 6 in the morning, at the Grand Courthouse in West Kowloon. Reached by telephone, the former leader of the democratic opposition went into exile in the United States before being arrested.
The forty-seven opposition figures, in other words almost all of the pro-democracy camp – with the exception of those who managed to leave before the first crackdown in January 2021 – are accused of “conspiracy to commit an act of sedition”, after their participation in the primary elections in July 2020. All the defendants participated, either as candidates or as organizers.
If found guilty, they face very heavy sentences of up to life in prison under the national security law imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong in order to gag any form of dissent and entered into force on June 30, 2020.
For Mr. Kwok, “any legal system based on common law [le système juridique qui prévaut dans les pays anglo-saxons] and respect for human rights should have dismissed this case two years ago”.
Nearly half of the defendants are stalwarts of Hong Kong politics, party leaders and seasoned MPs, such as Lee Cheuk-yan, Claudia Mo, Leung Kwok-hung aka “long hair”, or the law professor, Benny Tai, mastermind of the primary strategy at the heart of the trial.
Others are, on the contrary, young faces, from the two recent political movements, the Umbrella Revolt in 2014 and the “anti-extradition” riots in 2019, such as Joshua Wong, Lester Shum, Gwyneth Ho. Some entered politics during of the 2019 district elections (which the opposition had won by a large margin) hoped to run in the September 2020 legislative elections for the first time. This new guard represented the future of the pro-democracy opposition. But that future has been destroyed by the national security law. For the authorities, this trial is an opportunity to try to permanently exclude from political life those who made the pro-democracy opposition exist in Hong Kong.
Fragility or even absence of charges
In court, the prosecution will try to convince the judges – they have been chosen by name by the Chief Executive, replacing a jury which is however traditional in High Court trials – that the exercise of primaries to which the forty-seven defendants participated in July 2020 was an attempt to overthrow the government, justifying the charge of “sedition”.
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