Forty-five pro-democracy activists were sentenced Tuesday to prison terms ranging from four to 10 years in Hong Kong’s largest case under Beijing’s 2020 national security law. The defendants were accused of conspiring to subvert the government by holding unofficial primary elections for Hong Kong’s legislature in July 2020.
Authorities said the elections undermined state power by attempting to secure a majority needed to veto budgets, which could have dissolved the legislature and forced its leader to resign. Benny Tai, a 60-year-old former law professor, received the longest sentence of 10 years for co-organizing the primary elections. The case was brought under China’s national security law, which criminalized dissent in June 2020 after mass antigovernment protests in 2019. In total, 47 people were charged in the elections; two were acquitted in May.
In recent years, Beijing has asserted more control over Hong Kong—a special administrative region that was mostly autonomous from Communist Party control following the UK ceding it to China in 1997.
