This blog was authored by Benedict Rogers, the co-founder and Chief Executive of Hong Kong Watch and author of “The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny (Optimum Publishing International, 2022).
In the infamous trial scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, the King of Hearts asks the jury – “in a low, trembling voice” – to consider their verdict.
“No, no!,” the Queen of Hearts cries. “Sentence first – verdict afterward”.
“Stuff and nonsense!,” said Alice loudly.
In the trial of Hong Kong entrepreneur, media tycoon and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, currently underway, the sentence has yet to be decided and the verdict has not yet, officially, been reached, even if it is believed to be predetermined. But in every other sense, it is reaching Alice In Wonderland levels of ridiculousness. “Stuff and nonsense!” is an entirely appropriate response.
Accused under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and publishing “seditious” materials, in reality Jimmy Lai is charged, as Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, head of his international legal team at Doughty Street Chambers puts it, with the crimes of conspiracy to commit journalism, for daring to publish stories and opinions which Beijing dislikes, conspiracy to talk about politics to politicians, and conspiracy to raise human rights concerns with human rights organisations. This farce must end.
On 2 January, I woke up to the surreal news that I was among several foreigners named as Mr Lai’s “collaborators”. According to media reports, in court the prosecution displayed a chart labelled “Lai Chee-ying’s external political connections”, showing headshots of me, my friend Luke de Pulford and former US Consul-General to Hong Kong James Cunningham, who chairs the board of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation. A former US general, Jack Keane, and former US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were also named. I feel honoured to be in such company.
The next day, among its so-called “evidence”, the prosecution produced a text message that Mr Lai had sent me in 2019, asking me to ask the last governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten to provide a comment to his Apple Daily reporters. It was completely bizarre that a perfectly normal, legitimate, day-to-day journalistic activity is now cited as proof of a “crime” in a court of law.
The following day, the prosecution produced a “map” linking Mr Lai, “the mastermind”, to a wide range of foreign nationals, including several United States Senators, Japanese Parliamentarians and the British Consul-General to Hong Kong from from 2016-2020, Andrew Heyn. The map was both preposterous and amateur in content and presentation. As one observer commented, it looked like a last-minute late-night student essay crisis; another noted that the prosecution were drawing “doodles” in court.
The allegations against my friends Luke de Pulford and US-born financier and campaigner Bill Browder, both British citizens, and former Japanese Member of Parliament Shiori Kanno, as well as Mr Lai’s assistant, US citizen Mark Simon, are more serious. They are accused of being co-conspirators with Mr Lai, who is accused of being the “mastermind” of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and particularly the protests in 2019.
Such accusations are ludicrous. The mere suggestion that several million Hong Kongers took to the streets in 2019 at Mr Lai’s instruction is fantasy. It is a gross insult to the intelligence and character of Hong Kongers, as it suggests that they could not think and act for themselves. And it fails to take into consideration of the diversity of opinion within Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
Mr Lai is from the older, moderate generation of Hong Kong democrats who have never advocated violence, secession or independence, never challenged China’s sovereignty and only ever supported peaceful protests. Indeed, he strongly opposed those who engaged in extreme action, spoke out against violence and disagreed with advocates of independence. He has already spent three years in jail for multiple other sentences, one of which was for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a peaceful vigil to mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He has only ever argued for the basic rights and freedoms promised to Hong Kong at the handover in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and guaranteed in Hong Kong’s Basic Law. The suggestion that this successful entrepreneur is, as the prosecution alleged, a “radical political figure” is a sign of Beijing’s unhinged paranoia.
I have the privilege of knowing Mr Lai and his family. For a year, I wrote a weekly column for the English language edition of the Apple Daily, filing my last column the night before the newspaper was raided by police and a week before it was forced to close. Ever since his arrest and imprisonment over three years ago, I have been campaigning for justice for Mr Lai.
To see someone you profoundly admire, and have the privilege of calling a friend, unjustly jailed and outrageously prosecuted in a gross miscarriage of justice under a draconian law that has torn apart the freedoms of the city where you began your working life and to which you yourself can no longer return is heartbreaking.
To think of that friend, who is a hero and an inspiration to me as he is to so many, spending the rest of his life in jail, apart from the family he adores and which you know, love and respect, is heart wrenching.
To recall the lunches and dinners you had with him, to reflect that you may never see him again, and worse – to consider that every conversation you have had with him is now considered a “crime scene”, potentially used as evidence against him – is both gut wrenching and ludicrous.
That is why I devoted much of last week to ensuring that we do everything possible to shine a spotlight on the outrageous injustice of Mr Lai’s trial. Six of Hong Kong Watch’s Patrons – former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, two of Britain’s top barristers, Baroness Helena Kennedy, KC and Sir Geoffrey Nice, KC, and a cross-party group of Parliamentarians including Lord Alton of Liverpool, Alistair Carmichael MP and Sarah Champion MP – wrote to the Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron demanding he speak out against the unjust trial of Mr Lai, a British citizen, and the involvement of three other British nationals (myself, Luke de Pulford and Bill Browder), and that he answer the submission we made almost a year ago on the case for sanctioning Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee. They also wrote to The Times for the same purpose.
The British government owes it to Mr Lai, to us and to itself to speak out against this Alice in Wonderland charade. Being named in the proceedings against Mr Lai will never silence me – indeed, it only makes me more determined to redouble my efforts to fight for his freedom. Until he is released, I will never stop saying #FreeJimmyLai.