“
Mamie Wong
”, a sixty-year-old accustomed to pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, was imprisoned on Wednesday July 13 for illegal assembly, the latest figure from this movement to be imprisoned.
She joins a long list of activists imprisoned as part of Hong Kong's crackdown on dissent, launched through a national security law imposed by Beijing in mid-2020 after major pro-democracy protests in 2019.
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Yelled 'offensive words'
On Tuesday, Koo Sze-yiu, a 75-year-old Hong Kong activist with terminal cancer, was sentenced to nine months in prison for attempted sedition.
Alexandra Wong, 66, known to everyone by the nickname "
Grandma Wong
" ("
Grandma Wong
") was known to demonstrate by waving the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom of which Hong Kong was still a colony when she was born before to be returned to China in 1997. The prosecution accused her of taking part in two banned rallies on August 11, 2019 and of shouting “
offensive words
”.
He also felt that the flag she was waving and the slogans she was chanting had encouraged an illegal assembly.
She was sentenced to eight months in prison, with Judge Adam Yim citing
the "scale
" of the protests and "
the disorder inflicted on social order
".
The leader of an illegal assembly is one of the most used by the justice against the participants in these monster demonstrations, often violent, which lasted for months.
More than 2,800 people have been prosecuted in connection with this movement.
Glasses and gray hair, Alexandra Wong, who pleaded not guilty earlier in the year, changed her defense on Wednesday at the start of her trial.
She criticized the Hong Kong government, calling it an "
authoritarian regime
".
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She also repeated that she was interrogated and detained by security agents in mainland China for nearly 14 months and forced into a written and videotaped confession.
Alexandra Wong disappeared midway through the 2019 protests and then reappeared when she was arrested on a return trip to Shenzhen, a mainland Chinese city near Hong Kong.
She claims she was detained in mainland China, taken on a '
patriotic trip
and de facto house arrest before being allowed to return to Hong Kong.
In April, she received a six-day suspended prison sentence in a separate case of obstructing a police officer.
In July last year, she was sentenced to a month in prison for the assault on a security guard at the Supreme Court in January 2019.