Occupy poster boy Joshua Wong returns to jail in Hong Kong despite winning appeal for lighter sentence
- Activist was previously found guilty of contempt after not leaving a site in Mong Kok that judges had ordered cleared
- Wong’s sentence has been reduced from three to two months
Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung was thrown back in jail on Thursday despite winning an appeal for a lighter sentence over a conviction related to the 2014 Occupy protests.
Wong, the poster boy for the biggest civil disobedience movement in the city’s history, was jailed for three months in January last year after pleading guilty to contempt of court for failing to leave a protest site which a court had ordered be cleared.
The 22-year-old lodged an appeal after being sentenced and was released on bail after six days in prison.
On Thursday, the Court of Appeal reduced his term to two months, but refused to set aside the jail sentence.
The event for which Wong was jailed is largely a footnote in the history of the Occupy movement, during which pro-democracy protesters occupied major thoroughfares in various parts of Hong Kong for 79 days, in defiance of a restrictive framework Beijing handed down for the city’s leadership election.
