Court sentences editor to 21 months in jail

Chung Pui-kuen, the former chief editor of defunct Stand News, arrives at the Wanchai District Court yesterday

A Hong Kong court sentenced a former editor of a shuttered news publication to 21 months in prison yesterday in a sedition case that is widely seen as an indicator of media freedom in the city, once hailed as a beacon of press freedom in Asia. A second editor was freed after his sentence was reduced because of ill health and time already served in custody.

Former Stand News editor-in-chief Chung Pui-kuen and former acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam are the first journalists convicted under a colonial-era sedition law since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Chung was sentenced to 21 months but is expected to stay in prison for about 10 months given his pre-conviction detention. Lam was also sentenced but allowed to go free.

The online news outlet was one of last in Hong Kong that dared to criticize authorities as Beijing imposed a crackdown on dissidents following massive pro-democracy protests in 2019.

Its closure in December 2021 came months after the demise of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, whose jailed founder Jimmy Lai is battling collusion charges under a tough national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.

Last month, the court found Chung and Lam guilty of conspiracy to publish and reproduce seditious materials, along with Best Pencil (Hong Kong) Ltd., Stand News’ holding company. They faced up to two years in prison and a fine of 5,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $640). The company was fined that amount.

Judge Kwok Wai-kin began yesterday’s sentencing hearing two hours after the scheduled time. The journalists’ lawyer, Audrey Eu, requested a sentence mitigation, saying Lam had been diagnosed with a rare disease and she was concerned that he could not be treated by the hospital handling his case if he were sent to jail again.

She argued that they should be sentenced to up to time served, saying their case was different because they were journalists whose duties were to report different people’s views. The defendants were detained for nearly a year after their arrests before being released on bail in late 2022.

In his sentencing, Kwok dismissed the defense’s argument that the journalists had unintentionally fallen afoul of the law, and accused them of siding with the protesters. Since Stand News had a mass following, the seditious articles caused serious harm to the Beijing and Hong Kong governments, he said.

“The three defendants were not engaged in genuine media work but were instead participating in the so-called resistance movement of that time,” he said.

Kwok wrote in his verdict in August that Stand News had become a tool for smearing the Beijing and Hong Kong governments during the 2019 protests. He ruled that 11 articles published under the defendants’ leadership carried seditious intent, including commentaries written by activist Nathan Law and veteran journalists Allan Au and Chan Pui-man. Chan, who is also Chung’s wife, earlier pleaded guilty in the Apple Daily case and is in custody awaiting her sentence.

Kwok said Lam and Chung were aware of and agreed with the seditious intent, and made Stand News available as a platform to incite hatred against the Beijing and Hong Kong governments and the judiciary.

Eu told the court that the articles in question represented only a small portion of what Stand News had published. The defendants also stressed their journalistic mission in their mitigation letters. MDT/AP