Nearly fifty members of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement were indicted Sunday for “subversion” in connection with the primaries of last summer, an illustration of the relentless repression carried out by Beijing.
The group, the largest to be indicted on the same day in the name of the draconian national security law, was among 55 people, including some of the best-known Hong Kong opposition figures, who were arrested in early January.
Police said 47 were being prosecuted for “conspiracy to commit an act of subversion,” one of the qualifications covered by the National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in response to months of protests that had shaken them. the city in 2019.
The former British colony then went through its worst political crisis since its handover in 1997 to China. And Beijing undertook last year a muscular takeover of its theoretically semi-autonomous region.
This was notably materialized by the new law which was imposed at the end of June 2020 without debate within the Legislative Council (LegCo) of Hong Kong and tackles four types of crime: subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.
These prosecutions are punishable by life imprisonment.
“We will fight”
Those indicted on Sunday represent a very broad spectrum of local opposition, with former MPs like Claudia Mo, academics like Benny Tai, lawyers, social workers and many younger activists like Joshua Wong.
Police said a total of 39 men and eight women between the ages of 23 and 64 had been charged.
Joshua Wong, one of the best-known faces of the pro-democracy movement, is already in jail on a conviction for organizing protests in 2019.
John Clancey, an American lawyer and Hong Kong resident who was among those arrested, has not been charged.
Several of those prosecuted were combative before going to the police station.
“Democracy is never a gift from heaven. It is won with an iron will, ”said Jimmy Sham of the Civil Front for Human Rights, an organization that has always championed non-violence and was behind the most massive protests of 2019.
“We will stay strong and we will fight for what we want. “
“It has been a long time since we decided not to bow to totalitarianism,” said Lester Shum for his part. “I hope this determination is shared by the Hong Kong people.
The 47 are being prosecuted in connection with the opposition primaries, in which 600,000 people participated in July, with a view to capitalizing on the legislative elections of September, finally postponed for a year due to the coronavirus, on the immense popularity of the 2019 mobilization.
The opposition had triumphed at the end of 2019 in the local elections.
“Serious provocation”
These primaries sparked the wrath of China, which presented them as a “serious provocation”, an attempt to paralyze the city government, and warned that the campaign could fall under “subversion” under the security law national.
Most of these candidates were subsequently disqualified by the authorities. And they had finally postponed for a year scrutinizing him, citing the pretext of the pandemic.
But Beijing’s detractors believe that its stance of rejecting the primaries ultimately means that any form of opposition is now illegal in Hong Kong.
“The day that participating in the democratic process became a crime,” tweeted Sunday Clifford Stott, a British scholar who had briefly been hired by the Hong Kong government to review police action during the protests.
Hong Kong has never been fully a democracy since the head of its executive is not elected by universal suffrage, and only half of the LegCo is directly elected by the inhabitants.
Nevertheless, China had always tolerated the existence of opposition.
Western capitals have accused Beijing of suppressing with this repression the freedoms that had been promised under the principle “One country, two systems” decided before the handover.