By Joyce Zhou and Clare Jim
HONG KONG, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Hong Kong's High Court on Friday convicted two pro-democracy activists of inciting subversion, highlighting their use of the phrase "end one-party dictatorship" in their political activities.
Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, were part of a group known for organising annual vigils marking Beijing's 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Lee and Chow, the former chair and former vice-chair of a now-disbanded group,
the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, could be sentenced to as much as 10 years in jail under a China-imposed National Security Law (NSL).
The judgment issued by three government-approved national security judges said it was the defendants' repeated if peaceful use of the phrase "end one-party dictatorship" rather than other political actions or beliefs that had breached the law.
The defendants "intended to cause others to lose confidence in the CCP by stirring up hostility and causing division, so as to achieve the objective of undermining the fundamental basic system," the judges stated in a 16-page ruling summary, referring to China's ruling Communist Party.
"Even though they believed and envisaged that the acts of resistance may not necessarily involve the use of violence or threat of violence, those acts would be in breach of the NSL, and carry a risk of long-term imprisonment."
Public commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests used to be legal and tolerated in Hong Kong and were seen as a symbol of the Asian financial hub's relative freedom compared to mainland China. They were effectively outlawed in 2020 with the enactment of the National Security Law.
Prosecutors had argued that the primacy of the Communist Party was enshrined in article 1 of the Chinese constitution. Defence submissions that the defendants genuinely believed they were acting within the law given Hong Kong's freedoms of speech were rejected by the judges.
"They just refused to pull back from the brink and were bent on embracing the resistance line of the Alliance to the very end," the judges said.
Some foreign envoys witnessed the events in court, including diplomats from the European Union and the United States.
The National Security Law significantly expands the powers of both the Chinese and Hong Kong governments within Hong Kong, following months of sometimes-violent pro-democracy protests that rocked the Asian financial hub in 2019.
Lee and Chow, who have been detained since 2021, had pleaded not guilty to the charge. Another former chairman of the group and also a former chairman of the city's largest opposition Democratic Party, Albert Ho, 74, pleaded guilty to the same charge.
Mitigation hearings for Lee and Chow are due to start later this month. Chow, a barrister, was among the most prominent of Hong Kong's younger generation of emerging pro-democracy activists. She began attending Tiananmen Square protest vigils when she was a primary school student.
Lee's wife, Elizabeth Tang, said outside the court after the verdict that it was "most unjust".
"Of course there’s no surprises but still I'm disappointed and I’m angry because I don't think he has committed any unlawful (acts)," Tang said.
(Reporting by Clare Jim and Joyce Zhou; Writing by Greg Torode; Editing by Stephen Coates and Edwina Gibbs)
