Fifty Hong Kong anti-government protesters plead guilty to conspiracy

Aug. 18 (EUROPA PRESS) –

Almost fifty protesters against the Government of Hong Kong have pleaded guilty this Thursday to a crime of conspiracy to subvert the institutions after the call for primaries to elect the pro-democracy candidates for the September 2020 Legislative Council elections.

Among the 47 accused is the founder of the ‘Occupy Central’ movement, Benny Tai Yiu Ting, the student leader Joshua Wong Chi Fung, or the former deputies of the Legislative Council Wu Chi Wai, Claudia Mo, Eddie Chu, or Alvin Yeung.

The case will now be handed over to the Hong Kong High Court, which will be in charge of sentencing all these people, says the Chinese government newspaper ‘Global Times’.

The defendants, who face sentences of up to life in prison under the National Security law imposed from Beijing, are accused of conspiring to subvert state power after organizing primaries in July 2020 to elect candidates for the Legislative Council.

More than 600,000 Hong Kongers went to the polls called by the pro-democracy political movement in July 2020, the results of which would serve to elect the candidates for the Legislative Council elections in September, finally postponed due to the pandemic crisis.

The authorities maintain that those primaries were not only illegal since they are not reflected in Hong Kong’s electoral laws, but also violated National Security legislation since they were supposed to boycott the Government, provoke an institutional crisis and demand sanctions of foreign countries.

The trial against these 47 people will be held without a jury, as revealed on Wednesday by the Justice Department of the new secretary Paul Lam Tingkwok, who has defended the decision to prevent the possibility of foreign interference, as well as to avoid “real risk” of harming the judicial process.