Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong sentenced to 10 more years in jail in national security case
High Court Judge William Tam jailed the 30-year-old for a decade over a collusion charge, saying the punishment must fit the gravity of the crime; Wong, already in prison since 2020, will be 40 when he is released.
Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong was sentenced on Thursday to ten more years in prison, in a ruling that closes the latest chapter of one of the most closely watched national security cases in the city and all but guarantees that the man once seen as the face of its pro-democracy movement will remain behind bars well into his forties.
High Court Judge William Tam handed down the sentence in a packed courtroom, telling Wong that "the punishment must fit the gravity of the crime". The ten-year term was shorter than the maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and below the thirteen-year starting point the judge said he had considered, after he weighed Wong's guilty plea, his expressions of remorse and his efforts to educate himself while in prison.
Wong, who is 30 years old, pleaded guilty in September to a charge of collusion with foreign forces under Hong Kong's national security law. He was accused of conspiring with self-exiled activist Nathan Law and others to ask foreign countries, institutions and individuals outside China to impose sanctions, blockades or other hostile measures against the governments of Hong Kong and China. Prosecutors said the offences took place between 1 July and 23 November 2020.
That period is significant. Beijing imposed the national security law on Hong Kong in late June 2020, after months of sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in 2019 had shaken the city. The law effectively outlawed or placed at risk many of the political activities that Wong and his peers had once taken for granted, and the group he helped to found, Demosisto, was disbanded within hours of the law coming into force.
Judge Tam said the offences had been committed at a time when Hong Kong faced a very high risk to national security and the rule of law. He found that Wong and Law had taken their campaign to what he called the "international battleground" before the national security law took effect, and had then deliberately adapted their activities to continue after it was in place.
Wong has been in detention since November 2020, when he pleaded guilty to inciting and organising an unauthorised anti-government assembly during the 2019 protests. He is currently serving a sentence of four years and eight months in the case known as the "47 case", a subversion prosecution linked to an unofficial pro-democracy primary election, which had been due to end in January 2027.
The new ten-year sentence will be served concurrently with the term he is already serving, which in effect shortens it by about two months. Even so, the ruling means Wong will be 40 years old by the time he leaves prison, a long way from his days as a teenage protest leader who rose to prominence during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, one of the boldest populist challenges to China's Communist Party leadership in decades.
Standing in the dock on Thursday, Wong was silent as the sentence was read out. He has previously said he never called for independence for Hong Kong and never sought regime change in China, a point his supporters have often repeated as they argue that his campaigning stayed within the bounds of peaceful political advocacy.
The sentence drew swift condemnation from rights groups and from campaigners outside Hong Kong, who described it as a further blow to a movement whose followers now find themselves in detention, in exile or, in the case of some, cowed into silence. For Beijing and the Hong Kong authorities, by contrast, the prosecution has been presented as a necessary defence of national security after the unrest of 2019.
What happens next is far from settled. No appeal or appeal deadline has yet been reported, and no new release date has been confirmed, leaving Wong's supporters waiting to see whether his lawyers will challenge the sentence. For now, the ruling stands as the latest and most severe measure yet against a generation of young Hong Kong activists whose protest efforts have been effectively outlawed by the sweeping security law.
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