When Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) was arrested on June 6 this summer, he wasn’t picked up from the streets of Hong Kong or asked to report to a local police station. Instead, the democracy activist was arrested at Stanley Prison, where he is currently serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for subversion.
Wong was charged with “colluding with foreign forces” after his latest arrest. Last month, his case was adjourned, again, until March of next year. The crime he is charged with committing, which could result in life imprisonment, is alleged to have taken place in 2020. As his current sentence will expire in early 2027, the timing has raised suspicions that the Hong Kong government intends to secure a fresh conviction that will keep Wong in prison.
“It’s obviously a political move to keep him in jail as long as they can,” said Eric Lai (黎恩灝), a legal scholar at Georgetown University’s law school.
Wong is accused of colluding with foreign forces between July 1 and November 23, 2020, five years before his latest arrest. Wong can effectively only be accused of national security crimes for these dates, because what he is charged with became a criminal offense on June 30, 2020, after Beijing imposed new national security legislation on the city, and Wong was placed in custody on November 23 of the same year.
This is the same time period, between when the national security legislation was introduced and Wong went to jail, as the events that led to Wong’s subversion conviction and four-and-a-half-year sentence. He was tried alongside 46 others, making up the famous “Hong Kong 47.” The “crime” that the 47 were convicted of involved organizing a democratic primary to try to win a majority in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and thus oppose the city’s executive.
But with over four years having passed, why the delay between the first charge and the second?
“From my point of view, they are making up cases, totally fabricating cases from nothing,” said lawyer and former lawmaker Ted Hui (許智峯), now living under asylum in Australia. “If they can’t find anything that’s being fact, they will make up stories and put [them] to political dissidents.”
The accusation against Wong directly names Nathan Law (羅冠聰), another former exiled lawmaker, as having worked with Wong in conspiring to collude with foreign forces. But this throws up a new question. An arrest warrant was issued for Law in July 2023. Among the charges was collusion with foreign forces, which Wong is now alleged to have committed alongside him.
Eight people in total were issued arrest warrants on the same day as Law. Not incidentally, Hui was among them. “That’s the first time the regime started to make it public, in high profile, that people like us should be tracked down,” he said. So the charges against him and Law are propaganda in his eyes. But he doesn’t think that’s what is happening with Wong.“It’s more perhaps defensive, to prevent him from leaving Hong Kong, from being out and having the influence [among the people of Hong Kong].”
But why? Others from the 47 have already left prison. What is different about Wong?
“He is [a] special one among all the political dissidents and prisoners,” said Hui, who noted that “there are dissidents who have been quite silent and quite cooperative to the regime while inside jail,” but that Wong is “definitely not that type.” Hui argued that Wong is still seen as a threat because he hasn’t backed down, and also because Wong also still has international name recognition as one of the most famous Hong Kong dissidents to still be behind bars.
Since his first conviction in August 2017 for “unlawful assembly,” related to the Umbrella Revolution protests in 2014, Wong has been jailed multiple times. After his latest arrest and arraignment, it was determined two months later in August that his case would be transferred from the local magistrate’s court to Hong Kong’s High Court. But despite last month’s hearing, and a previous one in September, that transfer has still not happened.
So, like Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤) and Jimmy Lai (黎智英), who have both spent years in prison awaiting trial or judgement, Wong is waiting for the wheels to be turned in a system that can no longer serve justice.
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