Hong Kong democrats Frankie Fung and Tiffany Yuen, who were recently released from jail after being convicted in the city’s largest national security case, have announced they got married.
Fung acknowledged their marriage on Instagram on Tuesday in a selfie with Yuen, hours after she returned home from more than four years behind bars.
“Previously [I] only had my wife’s number in prison, today [I] finally have her phone number,“ Fung wrote in a Chinese caption.
“[I’ve] followed her on Instagram too,” he added.
Fung and Yuen were co-defendants in the landmark national security case involving 47 pro-democracy figures.
During Yuen’s mitigation in July last year, her lawyer revealed that she had married while in custody, but did not disclose her partner’s identity.
Yuen and Fung pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit subversion and were sentenced to more than four years’ imprisonment after a judge deemed them “active participants” in the scheme.
Separately, Yuen was jailed for four months in 2021 for joining an unauthorised assembly on June 4, 2020 — the first year police officially banned the Victoria Park vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.
Fung was released last month, while Yuen was freed in the early hours of Tuesday. To date, 12 of the 45 jailed democrats have been released.
At the centre of the high-profile case, which began in 2021, was the July 2020 primary election through which the opposition camp sought to select candidates who could help it secure a majority in the legislature.
The judges ruled that the democrats intended to abuse their powers by indiscriminately vetoing the government budget in order to force the chief executive to resign if they gained control of the legislature.
Beijing inserted national security legislation directly into Hong Kong’s mini-constitution in June 2020 following a year of pro-democracy protests and unrest. It criminalised subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces and terrorist acts – broadly defined to include disruption to transport and other infrastructure. The move gave police sweeping new powers and led to hundreds of arrests amid new legal precedents, while dozens of civil society groups disappeared. The authorities say it restored stability and peace to the city, rejecting criticism from trade partners, the UN and NGOs.
