Woman activist jailed in Hong Kong over Tiananmen vigil wins appeal against conviction

Court finds police failed to fulfill their duty to facilitate public gatherings

The former vice-chair of a group that organised annual Tiananmen Square vigils in Hong Kong on Wednesday won an appeal against her conviction and 15-month prison sentence.

Chow Hang-tung, 37, is one of the city’s most prominent pro-democracy activists and a former leader of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. She was sentenced to prison in January for inciting others to take part in an unauthorised assembly in June last year.

Ms Chow, who is also a lawyer, was arrested on 4 June 2021 when her articles appeared on social media and in a newspaper asking members of the public to “light candles to seek justice for the dead”.

A lower court said this amounted to her inciting others to defy the ban. The judge at the time said Ms Chow was “self-righteous” and “completely disregarding [of] the law to think that the freedom of assembly was more important than public health”.

The new ruling is seen as a rare reprimand of the authorities in Hong Kong where public commemoration of Beijing’s bloody crackdown on students in 1989 has been virtually wiped out. Authorities have officially banned the vigil for three consecutive years citing the Covid pandemic.

Ms Chow will continue to remain in custody over two other national security cases involving the group even though her present 15-month prison has been repealed.

On Wednesday, High Court judge Judianna Barnes said the police wrongly banned the vigil in 2021 as they did not “proactively and seriously consider” ways to facilitate a public gathering in accordance with the law.

Her appeal was upheld as the government failed to prove the ban was legally valid, the court said. Prior to the vigil, the police had warned that thousands of officers would be on standby to halt any “unlawful assemblies”.

Judge Barnes observed that the police failed to fulfill their duty to facilitate public gatherings, such as social distancing.

“Although the organisers expressed willingness to follow any reasonable demands by the police, the police only raised questions... and did not propose measures or conditions that could obviously be considered,” the judge was quoted by AFP as saying.

She added that an experts’ report prepared by the health department suggested only that mass gatherings involving unmasked activities and eating were barred and did not “completely oppose mass gatherings”.

“[I] believe the police did not consider this report when it decided to ban the gathering,” the judge observed.