Hong Kong High Court kills legal autonomy to jail activists
By Adele Rutherford · Reporting from Atlanta ·
The law is never just about the sentence; it is about the definition.
The law is never just about the sentence; it is about the definition. When a court decides that a specific phrase is a crime, it is not practicing jurisprudence; it is performing an autopsy on dissent. On Friday, September 11, 2026, the Hong Kong High Court completed this task for the leaders of the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.
As reported by Rappler and CBC News, the court handed down prison terms that are as much about the future as they are about the past. Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, received seven years. Chow Hang-tung, 41, received seven years and three months. Albert Ho, 74, who pleaded guilty in January, was sentenced to five years and two months. The group itself was hit with a fine of HK$1.5 million. The "crime" was the organization of annual vigils commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Specifically, the judges focused on the activists' use of the phrase “end one-party dictatorship.”
The Grammar of Subversion
In a courtroom, the choice of a word is a choice of fate. The prosecution’s argument was a clinical exercise in constitutional primacy: they asserted that because the leadership of the Communist Party is enshrined in Article 1 of the Chinese constitution, any call to end that dictatorship is, by definition, an act of subversion.
This is the same logic that fueled the Trial of Alexei Navalny in 2021—the rebranding of political opposition as a security threat to the state. By shifting the argument from the action (peaceful assembly) to the ideology (the desire for a different system), the court removes the possibility of a defense. If the state’s existence is the only legal standard, then the mere suggestion of an alternative is a felony. Chow Hang-tung saw this clearly, stating that the prosecution was an attempt to "erase memories" by reading too much into slogans. She is correct. When the law is used to police the vocabulary of memory, it is no longer a shield for the citizen; it is a weapon for the sovereign.
The Stability of the Graveyard
The most capable advocate for the state would argue that these sentences are a necessary price for order. They would point to the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong as evidence that unchecked activism leads to chaos, and they would cite Beijing’s position that the National Security Law is "necessary to maintain stability." They would argue that no state can survive if its foundational constitutional order is openly incited against.
But stability bought through the imprisonment of seventy-year-olds is not stability; it is silence. We have seen this mechanism before in East Germany's suppression-of-democracy-movements, where the judicial apparatus was not used to resolve disputes, but to criminalize the very idea of a democratic alternative. The shared mechanism is the use of "national security" as a blanket to smother any political movement that refuses to acknowledge the state's monopoly on power.
This is a pattern, not an anomaly. We saw it in the 2022 Belarus protests, where commemorating historical events became an act of subversion. We saw it in the 2023 Thailand protests, where lèse-majesté laws were used to jail those who challenged the central authority. In each case, the state argues that the law is preserving the nation, when in fact it is merely preserving the current administration.
The Confiscation of Memory
The court’s work is not finished with the prison terms. As Free Malaysia Today notes, the prosecution is now pushing for the confiscation of the "Pillar of Shame" statue and the Hong Kong Alliance museum archives. Judge Alex Lee has left the statue's fate pending an ownership decision, but the trajectory is clear.
The goal is a total scrubbing of the record. First, you disband the organization. Second, you imprison the leaders. Third, you seize the artifacts. This is the final stage of the process: the physical removal of the evidence that a different way of thinking ever existed. It is the same impulse that drove the 2020 Hong Kong protests into the hands of a security law designed to dismantle pro-democracy organizations from the inside out.
The "one country, two systems" promise of 1997 was a procedural guarantee. It was a bet that the rule of law could survive a clash of political cultures. That bet has been called. By treating the call for democracy as a crime of subversion, the court has signaled that the "two systems" have collapsed into one.
A rule that only functions while your party holds power is not a rule; it is a decree. When a judiciary decides that the primacy of a single party outweighs the fundamental right to remember a massacre, it ceases to be a court and becomes a department of the state. The sentences handed to Lee, Chow, and Ho are not about security; they are the final nails in the coffin of Hong Kong's legal autonomy.