On Tuesday, November 19, the Hong Kong justice system sentenced the activists to up to 10 years in prison. 45 pro-democracy activists found guilty of “subversion” at the end of the biggest trial ever organized for breaches of national security.

Lawyer Benny Tai was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, the longest sentence to date under the 2020 law, enacted a year after the massive and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in this Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China.

All the activists were found guilty of organizing an unofficial primary designed to select opposition candidates for the legislative elections, in the hope of securing a majority in the local assembly, vetoing budgets and potentially forcing the resignation of the pro-Beijing leader of Hong Kong then in place, Carrie Lam.

The United States immediately “strongly condemned” this condemnation, while Australia declared itself “gravely concerned” by the verdict.

A “constitutional crisis

Despite warnings from the authorities, 610,000 people had voted in the primarynearly a seventh of Hong Kong’s voting-age population. The authorities eventually abandoned the assembly election and Beijing introduced a new political system that strictly controls Hong Kong’s elected representatives. Forty-seven people were initially arrested and charged in 2021.

The judges found that the group had created a “constitutional crisis” if he had continued his action, and 45 were found guilty of “conspiracy to subvert the power of the state”. Two of the defendants, social worker Lee Yue-shun and academic Lawrence Lau, were acquitted in May after judges declared that they were not “not sure whether they intended to subvert”.

Politicians Au Nok-hin, Andrew Chiu, Ben Chung and Australian-Hong Kong activist Gordon Ng, referred to as “masterminds”were sentenced to up to 7 years and 3 months in prison.