His attorneys also said their client is facing a ‘barrage of spurious cases’ and ‘legal harassment.’
His attorneys also said their client is facing a ‘barrage of spurious cases’ and ‘legal harassment.’
L awyers for Jimmy Lai are keeping the pro-democracy icon’s case in the spotlight.
Earlier today, Lai’s international legal team called on the U.N.’s human-rights system to condemn the Hong Kong pro-democracy icon’s continued imprisonment and “legal harassment” by the city’s pro-Beijing government. In a statement about its appeal filed today, the team also added that the Chinese Communist Party has harassed Lai’s lawyers.
Lai was arrested in 2020, amid Beijing’s broader crackdown on the city, which had previously enjoyed a degree of self-government and autonomy from the mainland’s authoritarian system. He’s a pro-democracy giant who owned the Apple Daily, a massive media company that Hong Konger authorities shuttered last year as they waged a campaign against independent media outlets.
Since Lai’s first imprisonment under the 2020 National Security Law, an instrument of repression used to justify the silencing and imprisonment of the Chinese Communist Party’s critics, the city government has added a number of additional charges for his involvement in various protests and articles that ran in the Apple Daily.
“His assets have also been frozen, and he faces additional legal cases relating to his companies, including liquidation proceedings and voting rights proceedings, linked to his prosecution under the National Security Law,” Lai’s lawyers, from the London-based Doughty Street Chambers firm, explained in a statement announcing their appeal.
The statement issued Friday says that the Chinese government has also targeted Lai’s lawyers with “intimidatory tactics” for their work on Lai’s behalf, though they did not detail exactly what that harassment has entailed.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher leads Lai’s legal team, which also includes Jonathan Price and Jennifer Robinson.
The appeal, according to the lawyers’ statement, asserts that the cases against Lai “constitute prosecutorial, judicial and legal harassment of Mr Lai, because of his advocacy of democracy and the rights to protest and freedom of expression in Hong Kong SAR, and his work as founder and editor of Apple Daily.”
Lai’s son, Sebastien, commented on the appeal in the legal team’s statement: “The CCP may have swapped their guns for a gavel. But with patience, a gavel can do as much damage, and make much less noise.”
“I urge the United Nations Special Rapporteurs to investigate what the CCP through the Hong Kong government is doing to my father and dozens of other brave Hong Kongers,” he added.
On Twitter, the legal team said that the appeal was addressed to four of the U.N.’s Special Procedures on human rights — a group of experts who are knowledgeable of various areas of human-rights law. The appeal was addressed to Mary Lawlor, Irene Khan, Clement Voule, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, the U.N. experts who cover human-rights defenders, free expression, freedom of assembly, and counterterrorism, respectively.
Last October, they issued an additional statement expressing “deep concern” over the arrest of human-rights lawyer Chow Hang-Tung.
“Terrorism and sedition charges are being improperly used to stifle the exercise of fundamental rights, which are protected under international law, including freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of peaceful assembly and the right to participate in public affairs,” they wrote.
Prior to that, in a September 2020 letter, seven U.N. experts warned that the measure “infringes on certain fundamental freedoms,” and just after the National Security Law was put forward in June that year, dozens of experts warned about the situation in Hong Kong.
That, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader U.N. push to counter Chinese human-rights abuses. The organization has been reluctant to sharply condemn Chinese human-rights violations.
When Lai was arrested in December 2020 under the security law, a spokesman for U.N. secretary-general António Guterres offered a mild statement of “concern about the shrinking civic space in many places around the world.”
To date, Guterres has declined to condemn, or even recognize, the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of Uyghurs, and although U.N. human-rights chief Michele Bachelet has publicly criticized Lai’s detention, she has also delayed releasing a U.N. report on the situation in the Xinjiang region.
“I am very, very disappointed in her,” Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur human-rights advocate, told the AFP yesterday, on the sidelines of a human-rights conference.
While Lai and his supporters may not be able to count on the U.N. as a whole to intervene on his behalf, his lawyers are working to prevent public awareness of his imprisonment from slipping away.
Gallagher called on Hong Kong’s friends to act with a sense of urgency: “Vital rights and freedoms — to free speech, a free media, the right to protest — are vanishing fast in Hong Kong. Urgent action by the United Nations and the international community to hold the authorities to account is now essential.”
At the U.N., meaningful action is all but certain to be in short supply. Others need to step up.