Hong Kong media mogul activist appeals to UN over imprisonment

Lawyers for Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and media mogul Jimmy Lai have asked the United Nations to step in and investigate charges against him as “legal harassment” for his views, reports the Associated Press.

Lai faces “the risk of spending the rest of his life in prison simply for speaking out, and for seeking to defend freedom of the press, democracy and the rule of law in Hong Kong," Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Lai’s lawyer in the U.K., said in a statement earlier this week.

Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, was arrested in August 2020 on suspicion of foreign collusion – the most high-profile figure detained under Hong Kong’s controversial national security law.

The law was enacted in June 2020, shortly before Lai’s arrest, with the stated purpose of punishing terrorism, collusion with foreign forces and subversion. However, it defines these in extremely broad terms, allowing authorities to use it to crack down on all political criticism against mainland China since the mass pro-democracy protests in 2019.

Lai is serving 20 months in prison for the first charge and faces a number of other cases against him, including four separate criminal prosecutions relating to and joining various protests, his legal team in the U.K. said in a statement to the Associated Press.

The security law was used to freeze Lai’s assets in June 2020, forcing the Apple Daily to close due inability to pay wages and utilities.

Gallagher said that an appeal has been filed with the U.N. special rapporteurs for freedom of opinion and expression, counter-terrorism and human rights, rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and human rights defenders.

The AP notes that the powers of special rapporteurs, or independent experts, are limited mainly to information seeking with government agencies.