Tom Phillips - Hong Kong democracy campaigners jailed over anti-China protests
Hong Kong’s democracy
movement has suffered the latest setback in what has been a punishing year
after three of its most influential young leaders were jailed for their roles
in a protest at the start of a 79-day anti-government occupation known as the
umbrella movement. Alex Chow, Nathan Law,
and Joshua Wong, the bespectacled student dubbed Hong Kong’s “face
of protest” were sentenced to between six and eight months
imprisonment each.
The trio, aged 26, 24
and 20 respectively, had
avoided jail a year ago after being
convicted of taking part in or inciting an “illegal assembly” that
helped spark the umbrella protests, in late September 2014. But this month Hong
Kong’s department of justice called for those sentences to be reconsidered,
with one
senior prosecutor attacking the “rather dangerous” leniency he claimed
had been shown to the activists.
“See you soon,” Wong tweeted shortly
after the verdict was announced. In another
message he wrote: “Imprisoning us will not extinguish Hongkonger’s
desire for universal suffrage. We are stronger, more determined, and we will
win.” “You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds! We want democracy
in Hong Kong.
And we will not give up.”
The decision to
increase the activists’ punishments sparked outrage among supporters and
campaigners who condemned what they called the latest example of Beijing’s bid
to snuff out peaceful challenges to its rule. “It smacks of political
imprisonment, plain and simple,” said Jason Ng, the author of Umbrellas in Bloom,
a book about Hong Kong’s youth protest movement. Mabel Au, Amnesty International’s
director in Hong Kong, said: “The relentless and vindictive pursuit of student
leaders using vague charges smacks of political payback by the authorities.”..
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