May 5. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Hong Kong Department of Homeland Security has confiscated this Friday from an exhibition center at the University of Hong Kong the Pillar of Shame, a statue commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Police forces have searched this Friday an exhibition in the Kadoorie center, attached to the University, located in the Yuen Long district of Hong Kong, and has confiscated the statue, alleging that it incites “subversion”, according to the newspaper ‘South China Morning Post’.
The statue, by Danish artist Jens Galschiot, is around eight meters tall and shows a series of faces and bodies stacked on top of each other. It was already dismantled in December 2021 after having been at the University of Hong Kong since 1997 and stored in a shipping container on the university grounds.
Specifically, Hong Kong authorities argued at the time that the statue posed “legal risks to the University based on the Crimes Ordinance promulgated under the Hong Kong Government.”
The brutal repression of the student and worker protests that took place in Tiananmen Square between April and June 1989 remains taboo in China, and especially in Hong Kong, where the so-called National Security Law “prohibits acts of subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces”.
The United Nations has previously criticized said legislation, since it is used “improperly” to “repress the exercise of fundamental rights”, protected by International Law, such as freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of peaceful assembly and the right to participate in public affairs.
