Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison while nine other activists received jail time or suspended sentences on Friday for taking part in unauthorised assemblies during mass pro-democracy protests in 2019.
Senior barrister Martin Lee, who helped launch the city’s largest Opposition Democratic Party in the 1990s and is often called the former British colony’s “father of democracy”, was given an 11-month suspended sentence.
It was the first time that Lai, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent democratic activists, who has been in jail since December after being denied bail in a separate national security trial, received a prison sentence.
Lai was found guilty in two separate trials for unauthorised assemblies on August 18 and August 31 2019, respectively. He received a 15-month sentence for the first, reduced by three months in mitigation, and an eight-month sentence for the second, of which he will serve two.
District court judge Amanda Woodcock said even though the August 18 assembly was peaceful there was a “latent risk of possible violence” and that a deterrent sentence and “immediate imprisonment” was appropriate. Lai’s repeated arrests have drawn criticism from western governments and international rights groups, who raised concerns over waning freedoms in the financial hub.