Hong Kong's pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong on Wednesday pleaded guilty in a case in which he was accused to have colluded with foreign forces in order to endanger national security.
The case against him was filed under a law imposed by Beijing which has choked the pro-democracy movement of Hong Kong.
Wong, a pro-democracy activist, was serving a prison term of four years and eight months when this second conviction was announced.
While some critics say that his second conviction shows that Beijing is clamping down on dissidents in order to quash their activism, the Chinese government considers Wong and other dissenters like him anti-China figures who support independence for Hong Kong.
Wong was accused of conspiracy in order to invite foreign sanctions against China and Hong back in 2020.
As per prosecutors, Wong and his co-conspirators lobbied for a US law that would allow sanctions on Hong Kong and China using social media campaigning as well as meetings with politicians from the United States like Marco Rubio (who was then a senator) as well as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Prosecutors also said that the plan they had made was called 'International Battlefront', and was in action even after the national security law was enacted.
They said that Wong shared an online petition by fellow activist Nathan Law (who currently lives in exile in London) in which Law urged digital forensic companies to not cooperate with the police. This petition was shared after the 2020 security law came into effect.
The spokesperson of the Hong Kong government said in regards to the case and international criticism of the prosecution of Wong and other activists, “The lawful exercise of free speech must not be conflated with taking actions to collude with a foreign country to impose ‘sanctions’ to harm one’s own country."
Wong first came into prominence during a 2012 students' protest in which he led students against the introduction of national education in the schools of Hong Kong. Later, he gained prominence during the Occupy Movement of 2014.
In 2016, he founded a political party called Demosisto, and during the 2019 protests, he helped seek support from overseas for the democracy movement in Hong Kong. The party disbanded after the security laws were implemented in 2020.
With agency inputs
