Children's Book Authors Convicted in Hong Kong

on Sep 08, 2022

New York – Human Rights Watch stated today that Hong Kong authorities should overturn five people's sedition convictions for producing a children's book series. The District Court found the writers guilty of "conspiring to print, publish, distribute, or exhibit seditious materials" under the Crimes Ordinance on September 7, 2022. They face up to two years in jail following a mitigation hearing on September 10.

Prosecutors claimed that the defendants' three books, part of the Sheep Village series about a flock of sheep resisting the tyrannical rule of a wolf pack, spread "separatist" ideas by portraying the Chinese government as a "brutal, authoritarian, surveillance state" that its people feared and worshipped. The publications, they claimed, were designed to "unify anti-China and anti-Hong Kong elements."

The prosecution claimed without evidence that such beliefs may "weaken" China's sovereignty over Hong Kong.

"People in Hong Kong used to read about the ludicrous prosecution of people in mainland China for writing political allegories," said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Hong Kong authorities should rescind the five children's book writers' convictions and rectify this severe fall in liberties."

The five are speech therapists and executive committee members of the General Organization of Hong Kong Speech Therapists, a pro-democracy labor union. They are Lorie Lai Ming-ling, Melody Yeung Yat-yee, Sidney Ng Hau-Yi, Samuel Chan Yuen-sum, and Marco Fong Tsz-ho, aged 25 to 28.

Hong Kong national security police formally accused them of sedition in July and August 2021. They were held for over a year before being tried. The Hong Kong government deleted the General Union from the labor union registration in October 2021.

The Sheep Village books, which will be released in 2020 and 2021, depict the events that led to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, raise awareness of the 12 Hong Kong activists who are being held incommunicado in mainland China and criticize the Hong Kong government for keeping the borders with China open at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Since 2020, Hong Kong prosecutors have increasingly exploited the outdated, too-wide charge of "sedition" to crack down on nonviolent protest. The British colonial administration enacted the Sedition Ordinance in 1938, partly to prosecute Chinese Communist Party sympathizers implicated in the tragic riots in Hong Kong in 1967.

The colonial administration had not employed the sedition statute, which was unified into the Crimes Ordinance in 1971, since then, and until the UK government handed Hong Kong's sovereignty to China in 1997.