Hong Kong former district councillor Tiffany Yuen has been released after serving more than four years in prison for her role in an unofficial primary election in 2020.
The 31-year-old left Lo Wu Correctional Institution in the early hours of Tuesday and was reunited with her family. She is the 12th democrat to be freed after being convicted of conspiracy to commit subversion in Hong Kong’s largest national security case, which involved 47 pro-democracy figures.
According to reports, two seven-seaters with curtains drawn departed from the correctional facility at around 5:40 a.m. Journalists on the scene were confined to a media zone away from the prison entrance and were unable to film inside the vehicles.
The Witness reported that police outside the prison told the press that Yuen had left after the vehicles drove away. The arrangement mirrored those seen when Yuen’s co-defendants were released earlier.
Around five hours following her reported release, Yuen updated her Instagram account with a photo of herself holding a bouquet of flowers: “Thanks everyone for their hard work. Let me go to bed first. Give rehabilitated individuals a chance, I have to rest,” the post in Chinese read.
She added the flowers were gifted by her co-defendant Frankie Fung, who was released from jail last month.
It was revealed during Yuen’s mitigation that she got married during her detention.
July 2020 primary election
Yuen, a former member of the Southern District Council, had been detained since 2021. She pleaded guilty to the national security charge in August 2022 and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison in November last year.
Three designated judges found 45 democrats guilty, including 14 who underwent a 118-day trial.
At the centre of the case was the July 2020 primary election, through which the opposition camp sought to identify candidates who could help it secure a legislative majority.
The judges ruled that the democrats intended to abuse their powers by indiscriminately vetoing the government budget to force the chief executive to resign if they gained control of the legislature.
Yuen ran in the primary election and was deemed an “active participant” in the scheme. The court said the plan could not have “got off the ground” without the candidates lending their support.
Separately, Yuen was jailed for four months in 2021 for joining an unauthorised assembly on June 4, 2020. That year marked the first official police ban on the Victoria Park vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.
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.
