'Their ‘crime’ is organizing a peaceful candle-lit vigil', Benedict Rogers

Trial of Albert Ho, Chow Hang-tung, and Lee Cheuk-yan is a totem pole of Hong Kong’s descent into a repressive police state

Ten days ago, three prominent Hong Kong citizens went on trial for alleged crimes under the city’s draconian National Security Law.

A young and talented barrister, Chow Hang-tung, an elderly solicitor, Albert Ho, and a veteran trade unionist, Lee Cheuk-yan, are in the dock.

For what crime? Organizing a peaceful candle-lit vigil to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.

Their charge? Inciting subversion. The prosecution began the trial by stating that there are “no lawful means to end the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership”.

Their trial — alongside that of 78-year-old British citizen and media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, convicted ten days before Christmas on similarly trumped-up charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and publish seditious materials — is a totem pole of Hong Kong’s descent from a free and open society to a repressive police state.

Let’s examine the three individuals on trial right now.

Chow Hang-tung is a 41-year-old Cambridge science graduate who qualified as a barrister. She is a non-violent and peaceful intellectual. The organization I co-founded, Hong Kong Watch, released an online message on various social media channels on her birthday just over a week ago, and everything I have read and learned about her makes me want to meet her. I hope that day will come — either when Chow Hang-tung is free to leave Hong Kong, or I am free to visit the city where I began my working life.

Lee Cheuk-yan is a 68-year-old former trade union leader and legislator. In the years before the National Security Law in Hong Kong was imposed, I had some contact with him. We met on a few occasions. He is someone who won my respect and admiration by his moderate, reasonable advocacy — and is a man who deserves to be on a podium speaking to the world for his people, and not in jail.

As for Albert Ho, aged 74, my emotional ties to him are much deeper — and yet we have never met. In 2017, when I landed in Hong Kong and was informed by border control that there was a problem, I was introduced to Albert by a trusted contact. Albert offered to come to the airport to represent me when I was denied entry. He rushed to the airport — but literally minutes before he arrived, I was pushed onto a plane and banished from Hong Kong.

I will always remember his phone call to me while I was being held by Hong Kong immigration. He was already on the train to the airport, and he asked me if I would nominate him formally as my lawyer. I said I would, gladly.

He told me to ask the immigration officers whether they would allow him, as my legal counsel, access to me if he got to the airport.

They said they would, if he arrived on time.

Five minutes later, they frog-marched me to the plane and deported me — and I never got to meet Albert. But I will forever be grateful for his willingness to come to my aid without a second thought. He is a brave, selfless and dedicated lawyer who deserves to be lauded by legal bodies around the world, not jailed.

And that is the absurdity — and the tragedy — of the crackdown in Hong Kong over the past decade and especially the past six years since the draconian National Security Law was imposed.

It is one thing to prosecute violent protesters who committed arson, threw Molotov cocktails, or smashed government buildings and banks. While they should be understood as acts of desperation from a people whose peaceful protests had fallen on deaf ears and been met with teargas and rubber bullets from the police, such acts cannot be condoned. But Beijing and its henchmen in Hong Kong went well beyond what may have been justified in their legal crackdown. Beijing did not “restore order” — the regime instead pursued a campaign of vengeance against peaceful voices of dissent.

Elected legislators, lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and doctors have been jailed or driven from Hong Kong, simply because they spoke out for the freedoms that had been promised to them, defended the rule of law and human rights, or tended to or represented injured protesters. Brave, educated professionals like Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho, and Jimmy Lai are symbolic of many others. That is a tragedy that should not be forgotten.

When a city’s finest young minds are jailed, its bravest old advocates are incarcerated, and its most senior trade unionists, media entrepreneurs, and legislators are locked up, it is clear that its days of freedom are over — for now. And that means that its status as a global financial and trading center, and a trusted and reliable arbitration hub, is in peril. When you restrict, stifle, and jail the minds of inspiring lawyers, trade unionists, and legislators, you’re strangling your society and city.

So that is why, just over a week into their trial, the international community must step up its advocacy for the acquittal and release of these three truly courageous individuals, alongside Jimmy Lai and Hong Kong’s many other political prisoners.

As we reflect on this trial — and remember that their “crime” was organizing a peaceful candle-lit vigil to remember those who died in China’s 1989 Tiananmen Massacre — let us keep in mind the powerful words of Pastor Martin Niemoller, so apt as we just celebrated Holocaust Memorial Day:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Lee Cheuk-yan is a trade unionist. Chow Hang-tung and Albert Ho are lawyers. Hundreds more political activists, journalists and human rights defenders are behind bars with them.

We must stand up. We must speak out. And we must demand their release.

This article was published in UCA News on 2 February.

Photo: Stand News, Copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons