Hong Kong’s High Court has sentenced two organizers of the annual Tiananmen Square vigil at Victoria Park, Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人) and Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), to seven years and seven years and three months in prison, respectively. Lee, a prominent trade unionist and former lawmaker, and Chow, a human rights lawyer, were convicted last month of “inciting subversion of state power.” A third defendant, Albert Ho (何俊仁), pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years and two months.
As leaders of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance, Lee and Chow helped organize the commemorative vigil each year. Lee himself was in Beijing on June 4, 1989, after delivering donations from Hong Kong to pro-democracy student protesters, when the People’s Liberation Army killed between hundreds and thousands of civilians. Lee told the court in March that the experience shaped his “a lifelong commitment” to workers’ rights and advancing democracy.
Lee began working in the labor movement in the early 1980s and served for decades as general secretary of the pro-democracy Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. Democracy and freedom of expression “are internationally recognised as fundamental to trade unionism itself,” wrote the Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor in a statement about Lee’s conviction and sentencing.
“That these rights have now been openly trampled by the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities has implications far beyond Hong Kong itself, setting a deeply troubling precedent for authoritarian governments elsewhere seeking to suppress trade union organising.”
The South China Morning Post reported that 256 workers’ unions in Hong Kong were deregistered between 2020 and 2025, with a peak of 112 disbanding in 2022. Lee’s own organization, which was the largest independent trade union association in Hong Kong, voted to dissolve in October 2021, citing “political uncertainty.” The Hong Kong Speech Therapists Union also disbanded in 2021 after five of its leaders were arrested by national security police and charged with “conspiring to publish seditious publications” under the Crimes Ordinance. The seditious materials were a series of children’s story books about the 2019 democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Legislative Council amended the Trade Unions Ordinance, the main law governing trade unions in Hong Kong, in July 2025 in an effort to integrate national security requirements. The new rules allow the government to deny union registration based on undefined national security grounds, prohibit unsanctioned foreign funding and ban those convicted of “endangering national security” from forming unions.
The National Security Law “is detrimental to an environment in which human and labour rights and civil liberties, including trade union rights, are respected and exercised,” said the International Trade Union Confederation in a statement. “[T]he prosecution and conviction of Brother Lee and the others form part of a trend of targeting trade unionists and other human rights defenders to silence calls for democracy and respect for civil liberties.”
The international trade union platform LabourStart launched a campaign on Friday with the International Trade Union Confederation, Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor and several other organizations to call for the immediate release of Lee and Chow, who had been held in pre-trial detention since their arrests in 2021.
The vigils that Lee and Chow organized were not violent, nor did they call for violence. Nevertheless, the court ruled that the Hong Kong Alliance’s message to “end one-party rule” in China aimed to cause “others to lose confidence in the [Chinese Communist Party],” thereby subverting the power of the state.
“Ending one-party dictatorship doesn’t mean ending Chinese Communist Party rule,” Lee responded during his testimony in March. “Based on my love for the people, I hoped the Communist Party would reform, to let people have the rights and happiness they deserve,” he said.
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