Joshua Wong, in the center, was transferred to jail this Wednesday after hearing his sentence, in Hong Kong.JEROME FAVRE / EFE
The famous Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong, 24, and his colleagues Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam will have to serve prison terms.
In a hearing on Wednesday, the West Kowloon court sentenced them respectively to thirteen and a half months, 17 months and seven months in prison for crimes related to the siege of the central police station during the mass protests last year.
The trio had already pleaded guilty to the charges.
When sentencing, Judge Wong Sze-lai assured that a prison sentence is "the only appropriate option" to achieve a deterrent effect and prevent incidents such as those of June 21, 2019, which she considered very serious, to be repeated.
In her ruling, the judge maintained that the three activists were “active participants” in the assault on the police station and mobilized the protesters to surround those facilities.
The sentence will take immediate effect.
The judge flatly rejected Agnes Chow's request to be released on bail pending an appeal.
The young activist, who will turn 24 this Thursday and is facing a prison sentence for the first time, burst into tears upon hearing the decision.
In a statement, distributed through his lawyers, the former student leader declared that the sentence for them is not the end of the fight.
“We have another difficult battlefield before us.
We will continue the fight in prison together with many other brave protesters, less visible but essential in the fight for democracy and freedom for Hong Kong. "
Wong had pleaded guilty at a hearing last week to charges of organizing an unauthorized gathering and inciting others to participate.
For his part, Lam, 26, pleaded guilty to one count of incitement.
Chow had already accepted the accusations in a previous trial.
Wong, third time in jail
For Wong, one of the most famous Hong Kong activists in the West, it will be the third time he has served a prison sentence.
The last one, in contempt, saw him leave prison after five weeks on June 16, 2019, after the massive protests started initially triggered by an extradition bill - which ended up shelved - and which became a movement against Beijing to demand democratic reforms.
Wong is one of the best-known activists in Hong Kong since he led protests by high school students in 2013 against the imposition of a “patriotic” curriculum in the autonomous territory, and a year later he was one of the leaders of the Movement. de los Paraguas, the massive sit-ins to demand democratic reforms that paralyzed the city center for three months.
The young politician later founded, together with Chow and Lam, the Demosisto party to demand more freedoms in the enclave and which he ended up dissolving on June 30, when the new National Security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong came into force.
This summer, the Hong Kong authorities, with the support of Beijing, denied him authorization to stand as a candidate in the legislative elections that were to have been held this September and in which the opposition aspired to win the majority for the first time in the history of the enclave.
Those elections were finally postponed one year due to the covid pandemic, a delay that the opposition attributes to political reasons.
Wong, hated by Beijing, still faces illegal assembly participation charges related to holding a protest in October last year and the memorial vigil for the victims of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4 this year.