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Press conference with relatives of the arrested: lawyers would not be admitted to the detainees
Photo: JEROME FAVRE / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
The twelve Hong Kongers had a daring plan.
One early August morning, a woman and eleven men, between 16 and 33 years old, got on a motorboat and headed for Taiwan.
As supporters of the protest movement, they faced various legal processes in their hometown.
Freedom beckoned on the democratically ruled island.
Fellow combatants had already managed to escape this way.
The South China Sea is mostly calm in late summer, but the 700-kilometer journey to Taiwan on a small boat was still dangerous.
The twelve Hong Kongers had been preparing for it for months.
They had discreetly organized a boat and learned to navigate it.
It was an escape attempt like in the film - but it failed: They only got 50 nautical miles before the China coast guard caught them.
Icon: enlargePhoto: JEROME FAVRE / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
They have since been held on the mainland.
"I tried to visit my client, but was told that she had swapped me for two other lawyers," said Chinese lawyer Lu Siwei, the group's legal advisor.
At a tearful press conference, relatives reported that the lawyers they had hired were not allowed to see the detainees and that the families were not allowed to speak to them either.
Change of Hope Place Hong Kong
The failed escape highlights how much Hong Kong has changed in just a few months.
The city was once a place of hope for people fleeing poverty, political persecution and war, a refuge for countless mainland Chinese and more than 50,000 boat people from Vietnam.
Today, after the police put down the protests and Beijing forced a new so-called State Security Act on the city, young people are trying to escape from there as if Hong Kong was the GDR.
Hong Kong's government insists the twelve are suspects in criminal cases that have evaded justice.
In fact, all of them had previously been arrested during the protests;
eleven of them were forbidden by law to leave the city.
Some would have had to face proceedings even in a constitutional state like Germany, such as four alleged members of the radical front-line group "Dragonslayer" who are accused of building bombs.
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The group also includes Andy Li, a well-known activist who is being prosecuted under the State Security Act.
Li was arrested on the same day as critical media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai and only released on bail.
His case illustrates the pressure that democracy activists are under against whom the new law is being brought up.
The case of activist Li
Last November, on the eve of the Hong Kong district council elections, Li paced through a hotel suite in the Kowloon district.
A spindly 29-year-old full of nervous energy, lank hair, his feet in slippers.
The suite served as the headquarters of an action that Li had organized and which was not intended to break Hong Kong law but, on the contrary, to guarantee its observance: Together with supporters, Li had set up an international election observation mission.
"Because the government has failed, the people are now taking responsibility," he said, explaining his commitment, which he balanced with his job as a programmer.
"We, the people, feel that our government and law enforcement agencies are not acting in the interests of the people, but on orders from Beijing," he said.
"The state exists for the people, not the other way around."
To finance the mission, Li’s activists raised around 1.8 million dollars through the GoFundMe donation platform.
They flew in 19 experts from ten countries as election observers.
The British House of Lords, Lord David Alton, who led the mission, said he was enthusiastic about the professional organization: "It is wonderful to see how passionate these young people are for democracy," he said.
The elections were won by the so-called pandemocrats.
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Today, Hong Kong law enforcement agencies accuse Li of "interacting with foreign powers" - a criminal offense under the new State Security Act, which provides a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
They also accuse him of money laundering.
Judicial process in mainland China
After the failed escape, these allegations initially stand back, after all, Li and the eleven others are currently not in Hong Kong, but in the People's Republic.
The authorities in Shenzhen in southern China have announced that the twelve will initially have to answer for illegally crossing the border.
According to lawyer Lu, a guilty verdict can mean up to a year in a Chinese prison before they are transferred to Hong Kong.
In an e-mail to SPIEGEL, Lord Alton predicts a "classic communist show trial": "With a conviction rate of 99 percent in China, you don't have to be a fortune teller to predict the outcome."
In fact, Beijing has apparently already passed its verdict.
The twelve are not democracy activists, tweeted the Chinese Foreign Office spokeswoman Hua Chunying, but "elements that are trying to split Hong Kong from China."
That was an expression of opinion and not yet a judgment.
Nevertheless, it can hardly be understood as anything other than intimidation: separatism can also be punished with life imprisonment under Hong Kong's so-called State Security Act.
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