Hong Kong’s activist Joshua Wong again charged

The well-known Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong was arrested in his cell in the Stanley prison on Friday. He is suspected of « conspiracy with foreign powers », a violation of the National Security Act imposed by Beijing in 2020. Wong would have done that by, together with co-activist Nathan Law, internationally calling for sanctions against Hong Kong and China. Law fled the city in 2020 and lives in exile in the United Kingdom.

Wong was a member of the ‘Hong Kong 47‘Last year already four years and eight months in prison, also on the basis of the National Security Act, for his involvement in the organization of informal’ pre -elections’ of the Democratic opposition when Hong Kong would go to the polls in 2020 to choose a new board. If the 28-year-old Wong is convicted of the new suspicions, he can be put on a life sentence.

In his preliminary guide to a court in the Kowloon district, Wong did not speak, according to reports in local media. He only confirmed to have understood the indictment. The judge defended the case until 8 August.

‘Cruel and outrageous’

Wong is one of the most famous faces of the Hong Kong protest movement against the curtailment of democracy since the transfer of the former British crown colony to China. In 2014, 2019 and 2020 in particular, the city of Toneel of mass and increasingly violent demonstrations against Chinese authority was. The National Security ActDie strict penalties sets vague offenses such as ‘subversion’, ‘separation’ and ‘conspiracy’, made an abrupt end to such large -scale protests in 2020.

Wong himself was arrested later that year – not for the first time – for gathering, and has not left the prison since then. He was repeatedly convicted on the basis of various charges.

« Sometimes you don’t fight because you know you’re going to win, but because it’s your responsibility to fight, » he said in 2019, at the time of the big demonstrations in the city, in an interview of NRC.

The new indictment was convicted on Friday by human rights organizations. China director Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch that mentioned « Random, cruel and outrageous. » According to her colleague Sarah Brooks Van Amnesty International « underlines the fear of the authorities for prominent dissidents, and shows how far they want to go to keep them behind bars for as long as possible to discourage civilian activism in the city. »

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