The jailed Catholic publisher Jimmy Lai returned to court in Hong Kong Monday to give testimony in his trial under the territory’s controversial National Security Law.
Lai, who has been in prison since 2020, is accused of colluding with foreign powers and publishing seditious materials. If convicted, he faces life in prison.
In court appearances Dec. 13 and 16, his legal team sought to contextualize and defend alleged attempts to conspire with foreign forces against the governments of Hong Kong and mainland China, specifically by lobbying foreign government officials to sanction the Hong Kong government and local officials.
On Friday, Lai was asked to explain his account on twitter.com having reposted a tweet from Benedict Rogers, head of the London-based human rights group Hong Kong Watch, in 2020. In the tweet, Rogers called for the U.K. government to impose sanctions on members of the Hong Kong government, then led by chief executive Carrie Lam.
Addressing the panel of three judges hearing the case, Lai said on Friday that he had not personally reposted Rogers’ comments via his own account, and at that time most of the content on his Twitter page was managed by a columnist at Apple Daily, Lai’s Hong Kong newspaper, which was forced to close in 2021.
Lai said that his content on the Twitter site was mostly drafted and posted by Simon Lee, who the court had previously heard left Hong Kong in July of 2020 and expressed concerns about managing Lai’s Twitter presence following the imposition of the National Security Law that year.
“I did not know about [the retweet] at the time… it does not excuse me from taking responsibility for it,” Lai said.
On Monday, Lai was also asked about an August 2020 tweet discussing sanctions against Hong Kong officials declared by the U.S. Treasury Department in which Lai expressed surprise that Hong Kong election officials had not been included in the list of sanctioned parties.
He told the court Dec. 16 that he was only discussing the context of the sanctions and had not advocated for U.S. sanctions to be broadened.
Lai’s trial has now extended across 100 days of hearings. He initially entered a plea of not guilty to all charges in January.
Prosecutors have sought to portray Lai as a political “radical,” accusing him of conspiring with Western powers in the wake of the widespread 2019 civil rights demonstrations in Hong Kong and using his now-closed newspaper to call for “foreign countries, in particular the [United States], to impose sanctions, blockades or [undertake] other hostile activities” against both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland government.
The substance of the charges Lai faces is that his newspaper’s coverage of the shifting legal situation in Hong Kong, and the government’s crackdown on freedom of the press and civil liberties, amounts to sedition against the state. He faces life imprisonment if convicted.
Lai has repeatedly cited his Catholic faith as a motivating and sustaining force in his ongoing trials. Since his initial arrest, Lai has received numerous awards and accolades from both Catholic and secular institutions, including the 2020 Freedom of the Press Award from Reporters Without Borders.
He has been in prison, largely in solitary confinement, since 2020.
Lai has already been convicted of participating in a banned demonstration in 2019, when Hong Kong saw widespread pro-democracy protests against government plans to bring in a law that would have allowed political prisoners to be extradited to the mainland to face trial. The demonstration in question was a prayer vigil to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, an annual event previously permitted in Hong Kong but now banned.
That extradition bill was subsequently dropped by the Hong Kong government. But in 2020, the mainland government imposed a new National Security Law on the special administrative region, which critics have said undermines the Basic Law, meant to enshrine Hong Kong’s legal status following the handover of the territory from the United Kingdom in 1997.
When the National Security Law was imposed, Jimmy Lai called it the “death knell” for rule of law in Hong Kong. Soon after he was arrested and jailed on national security charges, he called his imprisonment “the pinnacle of [his] life.”
Apple Daily was one of the last pro-democracy newspapers in Hong Kong publicly critical of the erosion of civil liberties protected in the Basic Law. The newspaper was forced to close after the government froze assets belonging to Lai and his media company, and raided the newspaper’s offices, arresting several editors.
He has been the subject of a “marathon” cycle of court hearings and prison terms since 2020, and the government forced the closure of Apple Daily in 2021.
In addition to the slew of prosecutions and prison sentences to which he has been subjected, Lai — who has both Hong Kong Chinese and British passports — also faced official intervention blocking him from appointing his preferred lawyer to represent him in court.
Since its imposition on Hong Kong by the mainland government, the National Security Law has been used to arrest and prosecute several prominent Catholic pro-democracy advocates, including Lai, as well as the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen.
In December 2023, Agnes Chow, the Catholic pro-democracy activist released from jail in 2021, announced she had fled into exile in Canada.
At the time of Lai’s initial arrest in December of 2020, Cardinal Zen called the move “obviously a case of political intimidation.”
“This is evidently all about political persecution,” Zen said in an interview at the time. “Jimmy Lai is obviously the one who runs the only newspaper which is still completely free.”
“So, there is a clear policy direction: suppress the freedom of expression,” said the cardinal.
While the cardinal was originally held on national security grounds, including alleged collusion with foreign agents, he was ultimately charged only with failing to register the humanitarian fund through the proper channels — though the National Security Law charges remain unpursued by prosecutors, meaning they are effectively in legal cold storage.
Lai’s case is the most high profile of dozens of instances of pro-democracy advocates being arrested and jailed in Hong Kong since the National Security Law came into force.
In 2021, 47 politicians and advocates were arrested in a single night on charges of holding an illegal primary ballot to select pro-democracy candidates for election. Last month, 45 of them were handed prison sentences.
In November, more than 100 senior politicians from the U.S., U.K., and European Union signed an open letter condemning Lai’s “arbitrary detention and unfair trial.”
"The world is watching as the rule of law, media freedom and human rights in Hong Kong are eroded and undermined,” the letter said. “We stand together in our defense of these fundamental freedoms and in our demand that Jimmy Lai be released immediately and unconditionally.”
Trump has nominated Florida Senator Marco Rubio to serve as Secretary of State for the incoming administration.
In 2019, Rubio introduced the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, imposing sanctions against mainland government and Hong Kong officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in Hong Kong.
Trump signed the bill into law during his first presidential term.
