Hong Kong Sentences Three Tiananmen To Jail Over Organising Vigil

Three former members of a Hong Kong group that organised annual vigils to mark China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre have been sentenced to four and a half months in jail.

They were sentenced on Saturday for not complying with a request for information under a Beijing-imposed national security law.

Announcing the custodial sentence, magistrate Peter Law said; “National security is cardinally important to public interests and the whole nation."

Every year, the vigil had attracted tens of thousands of people in the largest public commemoration of its kind on Chinese soil.

The alliance was accused by the prosecutor, Ivan Cheung, of being a “foreign agent” for an unidentified organisation after allegedly receiving HK$20,000 ($2,562.69) in funding.

The national security law under which they were prosecuted criminalises secession, subversion, and collusion with foreign forces to intervene in the city’s affairs as well as terrorism.