Mourning is not a crime. Remembering is not a crime.
Today a Hong Kong court found Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung and the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China guilty of “inciting subversion of state power.”
This is not an ordinary judicial ruling. It is the day Hong Kong’s freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of association — and the historical memory of June Fourth — were convicted once again.
Since their arrest and prosecution in September 2021, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung have been denied bail and held on remand for more than 1,800 days. They had already lost close to five years of liberty before any conviction. Now the court has recast peaceful mourning of June Fourth, advocacy for a reassessment of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, and calls for democracy and accountability as acts that “endanger national security.”
For more than thirty years, what the Hong Kong Alliance did was mourn the dead, preserve history, demand the truth and seek accountability. These are among the most basic expressions of conscience in any society, yet in today’s Hong Kong they are treated as evidence of a crime.
When a regime fears even candlelight, puts memory itself on trial, and reads “end one-party dictatorship” as a criminal act, what we are watching is not the rule of law but the law being used as an instrument of political repression.
This case tries more than Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung. It tries whether the people of Hong Kong still have the right to mourn June Fourth, to speak the truth, and to keep their own history.
Today’s verdict is further proof that the space for civil society in Hong Kong has been crushed by the National Security Law and the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance. From the June Fourth candlelight vigil to the Hong Kong Alliance, from press freedom to the labour movement, from street protest to international advocacy, the Hong Kong government is criminalising, one by one, the forces that once sustained the city’s freedoms.
Still, we say plainly:
Mourning June Fourth is not a crime.
Seeking democracy is not a crime.
Demanding the truth is not a crime.
Refusing to forget is not a crime.
What deserves to stand trial is not those who insist on remembering, but a regime that destroys freedom, erases history and persecutes its people in the name of national security.
The New School for Democracy Association calls on the Hong Kong government to immediately release Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung, Albert Ho and all prisoners of conscience, to drop all political prosecutions, and to stop using the National Security Law and the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance to suppress the fundamental freedoms of the people of Hong Kong.
Memory does not disappear because of a verdict.
So long as there are people who remember June Fourth, who speak the truth, who refuse to stay silent, the candlelight the Hong Kong Alliance kept alive will not go out.