The global bar has called on the UK government to seek the repatriation of jailed pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai following his conviction in Hong Kong on national security charges.
Media mogul Lai, 78, faces a ‘death sentence’ unless world leaders take urgent action to secure his release, said the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) in its latest attack on the erasure of human rights in the former British territory.
The Apple Daily founder was today found guilty of conspiring to commit foreign collusion and to publish seditious materials, charges he denied, and faces up to life in prison. According to IBAHRI, his conviction ‘was a foregone conclusion after a dishonestly conducted and politically motivated trial designed to destroy the most influential pro-democracy voice in Hong Kong under a veneer of legality’.
Lai, a British citizen, was first arrested in 2020. He has already spent nearly five years in detention after being portrayed as a chief instigator of the 2019 pro-democracy movement in the city.
‘Jimmy Lai is a 78-year-old man, in ill-health, who has been held in solitary confinement for over 1,800 days,’ said IBAHRI. ‘He is already serving a sentence of over five years in relation to a fraud dispute. His sentence per his conviction this month – a maximum of life imprisonment – now represents a death sentence unless urgent action is taken by world leaders to seek his release. The international community must respond with the outcry that this lawfare warrants. In particular, as Mr Lai is a British citizen, the IBAHRI calls upon the United Kingdom to negotiate his transfer to the UK immediately. This is a test of the UK government’s commitment to human rights and freedom of expression.’
IBAHRI said Lai’s conviction for ‘conspiracy to collude with foreign forces’ and ‘conspiracy to publish seditious material’ under the National Security Law and colonial-era sedition law ‘is in fact the criminalisation of his journalism’. It added: ‘His conviction in spite of firm objection from world leaders, United Nations-appointed experts and international civil society threatens the tenets of our international rules-based order. The National Security Law has been widely condemned as being entirely contrary to international law, but it has been applied broadly in Hong Kong for political ends with impunity.
‘Mr Lai’s conviction is the final blow to Hong Kong’s democracy and rule of law. It forms part of a broader trend of the arbitrary detention of thousands of opposition figures and independent journalists and activists, and the wholesale destruction of the independent press. Those serving as the last line of defence of democracy have been systematically wiped out, and Jimmy Lai has been made an example of to intimidate others into silence.’
The International Bar Association warned last year that the ratcheting up of Hong Kong’s regime of state control through the National Security Law also jeopardised the independence of the legal profession. Lawyers have been systematically targeted in the clampdown.
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