Hong Kong’s top court upholds mask ban at protests

“The regulation had been widely reported by the media prior to the present offences. The defendants could not have been unaware of the consequences once the law was breached,” Ko said.

The five defendants were among 26 people charged over the disturbance in Wan Chai, which saw thousands of protesters confronting police during an unapproved rally against the invocation of the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to ban mask-wearing in protests.

This case concerned the stand-off that started from 5.12pm between Canal Road West and Tonnochy Road, where protesters set up barricades, burned rubbish on the streets and shone laser lights at officers.

A total of 14 petrol bombs were launched at police during the conflict, with two of the projectiles hitting two reporters by mistake.

Last month, the judge acquitted the five suspects of rioting due to a reasonable doubt that they might have been caught up in the chaos by chance. But he found the group guilty of breaching the government’s directive, rejecting the defence that they had worn a mask that day for health reasons.

The three sentenced to jail were Baptist University student So Nga-yin, 23, Chinese University student Henry Tse Siu-hung, 24, and music teacher Chan Lok-sun, 28. Both So and Tse are in the final year of their undergraduate studies.

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Defence counsel Tony Li Chung-yin urged the judge to consider a jail term of less than two months to enable the two students to complete their degrees in time, but Ko refused, saying the need for deterrence outweighed their personal circumstances.

Form Six pupil Lam Hin-shing, 17, was sentenced to up to nine months of training in two institutions run by the Correctional Services Department.

Angie Lee On-kiu, 19, who is pursuing a diploma at Chinese University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, was spared jail and instead ordered to perform 240 hours of unpaid community work, thanks to her guilty plea before trial.

Hong Kong judge asks court attendees to remove yellow face masks

Under the mask law, wearing facial coverings in a public meeting or procession is punishable by up to a year in jail and a HK$25,000 (US$3,206) fine.

In July last year, without lifting the law, the government made wearing a mask compulsory in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Offenders face a fixed penalty of HK$5,000.

The report includes a section on Hong Kong entitled “Hong Kong: Press Freedom in Free Fall,” which said that 25 years after its handover to mainland China, the city’s principle of press freedom “is more threatened than ever”.

“The repression no longer spares Hong Kong, once a champion of press freedom, where a growing number of arrests are now conducted in the name of national security,” Christophe Deloire, Secretary General of RSF, wrote in the foreword of the report.

It describes the law as “a crackdown on independent media,” and said that journalists are the “new black sheep”.

“The national security law, imposed by Beijing in 2020, gave the Hong Kong government the pretext to prosecute at least 12 journalists and press freedom defenders … and to shut down Apple Daily, the territory’s largest Chinese-language opposition newspaper,” the report said, adding that most journalists in Hong Kong fear for their future, facing the dilemma of whether they should leave or risk prison.

It also reviewed press freedom in Hong Kong since 1997, criticising the current Chief Executive Carrie Lam as a “puppet” of the Beijing government who “turns a blind eye to the violence on journalists,” especially during the 2019 anti-government protests, and targets symbols of press freedom like Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) to “please the Chinese regime”.

The importance of an uncensored media

Ronson Chan Ron-sing, chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), agreed with the report and said he is not optimistic about the future of press freedom in Hong Kong.

“We cannot deny the events that happened,” he said. “Some people were arrested, RTHK became a mouthpiece of the government … and the national security law has said [publications] that bring hatred to the government are wrong. This is a very bad situation.”

Chan said that while the national security law is already a powerful tool to use against journalists, there are more repressive laws yet to come.

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“The fake news law, Article 23 … It is like [the government] is afraid there are still some loopholes for you [the media] to do something,” Chan said.

“It’s hard to let the Beijing government understand that the purpose of the media is not to challenge the government but to monitor its work with public opinion,” he said.

Hong Kong ranked 18th in the RSF World Press Freedom Index in 2002, but dropped to 80th in 2021. Mainland China ranks 177th out of 180.