A Hong Kong Tiananmen Vigilante Activist stay in a national security trial has asked the court to uphold the “dignity and bottom line of the law” as it warned judges not to become “collaborators” in an alleged government crackdown on free speech.
Chow Hang-tung, a former leader of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance in Support of China’s Patriotic Democratic Movements, said authorities have “reshaped” the city’s old values by prosecuting activists who defend democracy in China.
Her statement in court was made Tuesday as the prosecution and defense finished their closing arguments. The three-judge panel said they hope to issue a decision in “mid or late July”.
Chow is representing herself in the trial, in which she faces a charge of inciting subversion under the Beijing-imposed national security law along with the Alliance and Lee Cheuk-yan, another former leader of the group. This offense carries a maximum sentence of 10 years behind bars.
Prosecutors accuse the Alliance of inciting others the overthrow of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). through his calls for an end to one-party rule in China, a key tenet of the group since its founding in 1989 after the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing.
Delivering closing arguments on Tuesday, Chow said the crux of the matter was whether the law protects the CCP’s “permanent rule” or the people’s rights to defend democracy.
“Ending one-party rule means ending the status quo, in which those in power are not bound by the law,” she said in Cantonese.
‘unheard of’
Prosecutors argued before that the Alliance’s calls violated China’s constitution, as a 2018 amendment stipulated that the CCP’s leadership is the “defining feature” of the country’s “fundamental” socialist system.
Chow argued on Tuesday that the CCP’s leadership is merely “symbolic” under China’s constitution, as the text has not defined the party’s power and function.
“King Charles III is also the leader of his country, but he has no real power,” she said, drawing an analogy with the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy.
Instead, it is a reality that the CCP is in power, she said. The Alliance’s advocacy was aimed at creating “favorable conditions” for the democratization of the country, not the overthrow of the regime, she added.
She argued that it was “unheard of” for a government to accuse its own citizens of violating the constitution.
“Every document that can be called a constitution in the world is to limit the operation of power, not of ordinary people,” she said.
Citing the trial of former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan, who was responsible for the bloody suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, Chow said it was those who sought to centralize power who were judged to have violated the constitution.
‘associate’
She also rejected the prosecution’s claim that the only “reasonable and natural effect” of the Alliance’s calls was to incite others. Her group was simply making political criticism and not calling for action, she said.
She argued that the charge against her showed the government’s “paranoia” and its attempt to silence those who voiced adverse opinions, adding that the defendants fully believed in their defense.
If the court were to find the defendants guilty, it would stop the political freedom the city has long protected, she said.
“If the court cannot strictly draw a line on what is the reasonable and natural effect (of political speech), it will easily become complicit in the crime of the authorities,” she said. “What is being judged is actually the law itself.”
Senior lawyer Priscilia Lam, representing the Alliance, argued that the prosecution had been unable to present evidence of the Alliance’s alleged incitement to subversion.
“What did the Alliance do to incite people to overthrow state power?” Lam said in Cantonese. “I haven’t heard anything about it since I’ve been here so long.”
For decades, the Alliance has organized vigils in Victoria Park to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, when hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed as troops dispersed pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square.
The alliance dissolved in 2021 after authorities suspended vigilance for two years, citing Covid-19 restrictions, and arrested its leadership on national security charges. Chow and Lee have been behind bars since September 2021.
Another defendant, former lawmaker Albert Ho, pleaded guilty when the trial opened in January.
