HONG KONG — Hong Kong police on Monday charged eight overseas-based activists with serious national security crimes, including foreign collusion and incitement to secede, and offered rewards for information leading to any arrests.
The defendants are activists Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, former lawmakers Dennis Kwok and Ted Hui, lawyer and jurist Kevin Yam, trade unionist Mung Siu-tat and online commentator Yuan Gong-yi, police said. at a press conference.
Issuing wanted notices and rewards of HK$1 million ($127,656) each, police said the defendants’ assets would be frozen to the extent possible and warned the public not to use them. support financially or risk violating the law.
“They have encouraged sanctions … to destroy Hong Kong and intimidate officials,” Steve Li, an official with the police’s national security department, told reporters.
The activists are based in a number of places, including the United States, Great Britain and Australia.
They have been charged under a national security law Beijing imposed on the former British colony in 2020, after the financial hub was rocked by prolonged anti-China protests the previous year.
Some countries, including the United States, say the law has been used to stifle the city’s pro-democracy movement and undermined the rights and freedoms guaranteed under the “one country, two systems” formula agreed upon when Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule. in 1997.
Chinese and Hong Kong authorities say the law has restored the stability needed to preserve Hong Kong’s economic success.
Yam, contacted by Reuters, said he would continue to criticize what he described as “tyranny.”
“It is my duty… to continue to speak out against the repression that is taking place right now, against the tyranny that now reigns in the city that was once one of the freest in Asia,” Yam, Georgetown Principal Investigator. The University’s Asian Law Center told Reuters by telephone from Australia.
“All they want to do is try to show their opinion that the national security law has an extraterritorial effect,” said Yam, who was accused by police of meeting with foreign officials to instigate sanctions against Hong Kong officials, judges and prosecutors. .
“I miss Hong Kong, but as it is, no rational person would go back.”
The other seven had no immediate comment to Reuters.
Police told the news conference that 260 people had been arrested under the national security law, of whom 79 were convicted of crimes including subversion and terrorism.
Li said that the police were simply enforcing the law.
“We are definitely not putting on a political show or spreading fear,” Li said, adding that the chances of prosecution are slim if the defendants remain abroad.
“If they don’t come back, we won’t be able to arrest them, that’s a fact,” he said. “But we won’t stop loving them.”
Britain-based human rights group Hong Kong Watch said in a statement that Britain, the United States and Australia should issue statements “to ensure the safety of the above-mentioned activists and the wider Hong Kong community living abroad”.
