How 45 people were jailed in Hong Kong for trying to win the election.

On November 19, the High Court of Hong Kong, a highly autonomous special administrative region of China, sentenced 45 of 47 defendants in a case of "conspiracy to subvert state power." All of them—politicians, human rights activists, and lawyers who advocated for independence from China and the preservation of civil rights and freedoms that existed in the region before its handover to China in 1997—were arrested in early 2021 as part of a large-scale police operation involving nearly 1,000 law enforcement officers.

The United Kingdom handed Hong Kong over to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The city became China's first administrative region under the "one country, two systems" policy, which guarantees the city autonomy until 2047.

It all started when Benny Tai, a legal scholar and civil society activist, published a column in a Hong Kong newspaper in December 2019.APPLE Daily is calling on the opposition to join forces to secure a parliamentary majority in the September 2020 elections. This, it argues, would allow it to speak from a position of strength to the regional executive, which has consistently made concessions to Beijing, restricting, in the view of its critics, the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong residents.

In March 2020, Tai expanded on his ideas in a column also published in Apple Daily, titled "Ten Steps to Real Mutual Destruction—Hong Kong's Inevitable Fate." In it, he explained that, according to the Basic Law of Autonomy, the opposition, having gained a parliamentary majority, would be able to veto the budget and thereby paralyze the government unless it reversed its pro-Beijing policies, which led, in particular, to mass protests in 2014 and 2019, and complied with the opposition's demands .

In February 2019, the Hong Kong Security Bureau proposed an amendment to Hong Kong's extradition law that would have included China , Macau, and Taiwan in the list of countries with which extradition treaties for criminal suspects are in force. This initiative met with resistance from lawyers, journalists, and politicians. The autonomous government, then led by Carrie Lam, was asked to withdraw the document. Universities and churches also opposed the amendment.

The government demanded the document be adopted without delay, waiving legislative procedures that could hinder its passage, sparking renewed criticism. Mass protests, involving hundreds of thousands of people, began in March 2019 and continued in the following weeks. Ultimately, the government abandoned the bill's progress but did not formally withdraw it.

During the 2019 mass protests, which were accompanied by violent clashes with police, Hong Kong's opposition formulated five demands:

• an independent investigation into police violence during the suppression of the 2019 protests;
• release and amnesty of all protesters in custody;
• legal reclassification of protests, assessed by the authorities as mass riots, for participation in which imprisonment for up to ten years is provided;
• the resignation of Hong Kong's leader Carrie Lam (she was replaced by John Lee on July 1, 2022);
• complete rejection of the extradition bill.

Implementing Tai's ideas, in July 2020, the opposition held unofficial primaries—later declared illegal by the courts—to select the strongest candidates capable of defeating candidates from pro-China parties and ultimately winning more than 35 of the 70 seats in Hong Kong's Legislative Council. According to organizers, over 610,000 Hong Kong residents, or approximately 13% of registered voters, voted in these primaries, significantly exceeding the opposition's expectations.

Carrie Lam threatened legal action against the primary participants and organizers, while the Chinese central government's representative office in Hong Kong called the vote illegal and accused its organizers of colluding with foreign forces. "The goal of organizer Benny Tai and the opposition camp is to seize power in Hong Kong and <...> carry out a Hong Kong version of a 'color revolution,'" a Chinese government spokesman stated.

On July 30, 2020, the authorities barred 12 opposition candidates from running in the elections, and the next day, Lam announced the postponement of parliamentary elections for a year due to the pandemic.COVID-19 . In January 2021, 53 politicians and civil society activists involved in organizing opposition primaries were taken into custody. On February 28, 47 of them were charged with "conspiracy to subvert state power." Police searched their homes and offices and seized $206,000, which was intended to be used for the election campaign. Apple Daily, which published columns and appeals from opposition representatives, was also targeted; the publication was forced to close in June 2021.

The trials in the "Case 47" were held without a jury. The first verdicts were handed down on May 30 and concerned Benny Tai and 13 other primary candidates, including former Legislative Council members Leung Kwok-hung, Lam Cheuk-ting, Helena Wong, and Raymond Chan. Only two of them were found not guilty (overall, more than 30 people, including Benny Tai, pleaded guilty).

The verdict was announced on November 19. The ruling by three judges—Andrew Chan, Alex Lee, and Johnny Chan, specially selected by the Hong Kong government to preside over the trial—was 82 pages long. The Supreme Court ruled that the opposition's actions violated Hong Kong's Basic Law and the national security law passed in mid-2020. The court cited Benny Tai's op-ed, in which he called for a budget veto, as one of the prosecution's key pieces of evidence. "Had this plan been carried out, the negative consequences would have been far-reaching and no less serious than the overthrow of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government," the verdict stated.

The court also rejected the defense's argument that the plan would never have been implemented, noting that its participants "made every effort to ensure [the primaries] were successful." "When the primaries took place on July 10 and 11, no one even remotely mentioned the fact that they were nothing more than an academic experiment and that the scheme was completely unfeasible. Neither did 610,000 ordinary citizens," the court's ruling stated.

All defendants in the "Case 47," except for the two acquitted in May, received prison sentences ranging from four to ten years—a total of 240 years for all convicted. The harshest sentence was handed down to Benny Tai, whom the court deemed the "mastermind" of the crime and sentenced to ten years in prison. The judges refused to show leniency to Tai, as he was a lawyer and understood the consequences of his actions, but remained "absolutely adamant in his commitment to carrying out this plan."

"Our true crime against Beijing is that we weren't content to play along with the rigged elections," wrote activist and former journalist Gwyneth Ho, who was sentenced to seven years in prison. "We dared to ask the regime: is democracy ever possible within such a structure? The response was harsh measures on all fronts of public life."

Case 47 has become the largest trial under Hong Kong's national security law, passed by the National People's Congress (parliament) in 2020. Beijing claims the law is aimed at preventing incitement, terrorism, and foreign interference in the region's affairs. The law provides for life imprisonment for separatism, committing a terrorist act, and colluding with foreign forces that threatens China's national security. It came into effect on July 1; Hong Kong's primaries were held a few days later, on July 11 and 12.

In March 2024 , the Hong Kong Legislative Council passed its own law expanding local authorities' powers to combat "external interference" and "anti-China influence" and introducing 39 new crimes against national security, including treason, sedition, sabotage, espionage, disclosure of state secrets, and others. Treason and sedition carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

The Associated Press notes that the trial of 47 Hong Kong opposition figures has become a clear demonstration of the growing suppression of dissent, repression of the media, and restrictions on electoral freedoms following the large-scale anti-government protests of 2019. It also, according to the agency, demonstrates Beijing's increasingly diminished commitment to fulfilling promises to preserve civil liberties in the autonomous region after its return to China. CNN also called the "Case 47" trial an illustration of how Hong Kong, where protests were once commonplace, is becoming a "mirror" of mainland China.

The Hong Kong High Court ruling in Case 47 was criticized by authorities in Australia, the United Kingdom , the United States, Taiwan, and the European Union. Jeremy Lawrence, spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed serious concern about the use of national security laws "to criminalize acts protected by the human rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association" in Hong Kong. The Chinese Foreign Ministry, for its part, stated that "no one can engage in illegal activities under the guise of democracy and attempt to evade legal punishment."