Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong to 10 years in prison on Thursday, in a second conviction under the Beijing-imposed national security law that is likely to keep the former student leader behind bars until late 2036. The Joshua Wong jailed sentence came just two months before he had been due for release in January, after nearly six years in custody.
High Court Judge William Tam told a packed courtroom that Wong’s offence was of a “grave nature” under the national security law, a category that carries 10 years to life in prison. Tam set 13 years as a starting sentence and reduced it by three years for Wong’s guilty plea, entered on September 2, but offered no further discount. “The punishment must fit the gravity of the crime,” the judge said.
Wong, now 30, was accused of conspiring with self-exiled activist Nathan Law and others to ask foreign countries, bodies or individuals outside China to impose sanctions or blockades, or engage in other hostile activities against the government. He pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiring to collude with foreign forces in September.
A sentence that starts over
Wong has been in detention since November 2020, when he pleaded guilty to inciting and organising an unauthorised anti-government assembly during the protests that roiled the Asian financial hub in 2019. He is currently serving a four-year, eight-month jail term for conspiracy to subvert state power in the landmark “Hong Kong 47” case, in which 45 prominent pro-democracy campaigners were convicted and sentenced to up to 10 years in jail in 2024.
His release from that sentence had been due next January. Judge Tam ordered that the new 10-year term run concurrently with the remaining two months of his existing sentence, which means Wong is likely to remain behind bars until 2036, when he turns 40, unless he receives sentence remission. In a mitigation letter to the court, Wong wrote that he had hoped to leave prison in 2027, but the new charge made him feel he was back to square one.
The conduct covered by the charge ran from July 1 to November 23, 2020, a time when Hong Kong was facing a “very high risk” to national security and the rule of law, Judge Tam said. Prosecutors said Wong worked with Law and others to press foreign governments to impose sanctions, blockades or other hostile measures on China, Hong Kong and their officials, through the pro-democracy group Demosisto.
Demosisto was founded by Wong, Law and Agnes Chow in 2016 and disbanded shortly before the National Security Law took effect on June 30, 2020.
The face of a movement
Wong became the global face of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement as a teenager, rising to prominence during the “Umbrella Movement” that convulsed the city in 2014. He was 24 when he was first detained in November 2020, and he has spent almost his entire adult life in custody since.
Beijing inserted national security legislation directly into Hong Kong’s mini-constitution in June 2020, following a year of pro-democracy protests and unrest. The law criminalised subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces and terrorist acts, broadly defined to include disruption to transport and other infrastructure. Hong Kong authorities have used the new legal regime, along with existing laws, to rapidly dismantle civil society and detain, imprison or force into exile hundreds of activists and government critics, according to Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights Watch said on Thursday that the court had sentenced Wong on baseless national security charges and called for his immediate release. The organisation said Wong faces imprisonment until late 2036, when he will be 40, and described the sentence as part of a crackdown that has effectively outlawed the protest movement Wong helped lead.
Pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai, founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, was given 20 years in February under the same legislation, in a sign of how severely the law is being applied to the city’s most prominent opposition figures.
What the sentence signals
The timing of the sentence carries its own message. Wong was two months from freedom when the new charge, brought in June last year, ensured he would stay in prison for another decade. The prosecution’s case rested on conduct from 2020, in the months immediately after the security law took effect, when Wong and his colleagues were lobbying foreign governments over Beijing’s crackdown.
For Hong Kong’s remaining pro-democracy movement, the sentence confirms that the authorities intend to keep its most recognisable figures behind bars for as long as the law allows. For Beijing, it is a demonstration that the national security regime will be enforced to its full extent, even against defendants who have already served years in prison.
Supporters packed the courtroom gallery on Thursday, many in tears as the sentence was read out. Wong, who turned 30 in prison last month, appeared calm as the sentence was handed down and thanked Judge Tam. He has now been in custody for almost six years, and under Thursday’s sentence he will not be free until he is 40 — a decade of his life spent in prison for a movement that began when he was still a schoolboy.