Businesses need reliable information to make decisions, but practicing journalism can now count as a crime in Hong Kong. Two editors face years in prison after a Hong Kong court convicted them Thursday for publishing content authorities didn’t like.
In June 2020 China imposed a national-security law on Hong Kong that outlawed dissent.
Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam of the online publication Stand News dared to keep publishing a range of perspectives, including interviews with and commentary by critics of the government. That amounts to “conspiracy to publish and/or reproduce seditious publications,” Judge Kwok Wai-kin ruled.
The two Stand News editors are brave by any definition. Mr. Chung’s wife, Chan Pui-man, a former associate publisher for the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was jailed in July 2021. The police came for Mr. Chung and Mr. Lam four months later. Ms. Chan pleaded guilty under the national-security law in a bid for leniency, and she awaits sentencing.
Authorities also raided the Stand News office and froze some $7.8 million in assets without due process, forcing the publication’s immediate closure in December 2021. Hong Kong did the same to Apple Daily earlier that year, and perhaps the next target will be a Western due-diligence firm or consultancy that runs afoul of the government’s censorious sensibilities.
Sentencing for the editors is scheduled for Sept. 26. Messrs. Chung and Lam were charged under a colonial-era sedition law with a maximum punishment of two years. But a new national-security law enacted in March raises the penalty to 10 years, and this case is an early test of whether Hong Kong will apply the harsher sentence retroactively.
Meanwhile Jimmy Lai, the publisher of Apple Daily, faces up to life in prison for alleged and clearly concocted violations of the national-security law. He has been in prison since 2020 and these days is being held in solitary confinement. His trial has been delayed again, and Hong Kong has denied his choice of legal counsel.
“The only way for journalists to defend press freedom is to report,” Mr. Lam wrote in a statement to the court and translated into English by the Hong Kong Democracy Council. He and Mr. Chung know better than most in the West the price of fighting for a free press. The benighted leaders of Hong Kong deserve the world’s scorn — and sanctions.
