Hong Kong activists Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow & Ivan Lam jailed over ‘unauthorised protest’

DHARAMSALA, 3 Dec: Three prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activists; Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Ivan Lam have been sentenced to varying prison terms by a court in the city for organising an unauthorised protest outside police headquarters in Wan Chai last June.

Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam were sentenced to 13.5, 10 and 7 months respectively by the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Wednesday for organising and inciting others to attend an unlawful assembly outside the police headquarters in June 2019, media reports said.

The trio, having remanded in custody for over a week after appearing in court last Monday were in attendance at the hearing where the judge, Wong Sze-lai has reportedly said that jail time was the only appropriate option in order to deter others.

“The court has considered that the offending period of the three defendants lasted for around 15 minutes and all the facts of the case, including that they committed the offence in a joint enterprise under the prevailing circumstances of increasing incidents of social unrest and large scale public protests, which in the court’s view, made the case more serious,” the Guardian quoted the judge as saying in its report.

The three activists were jailed immediately while Chow had his application for bail pending an appeal was rejected, the report added.

The report noted that Wong had pleaded guilty to organising and incitement, Lam to incitement, and Chow to incitement and attending.