Hong Kong protests: intellectually disabled man receives toughest sentence yet for illegal rally against national security law
- Jacky Su, 25, was jailed for 13 months for taking part in an illegal assembly on July 1, 2020
- The delivery worker’s sentence is the heaviest punishment imposed against rally participants so far
Jacky Su Ho-kit was sentenced at Sha Tin Court on Monday, a month after he was convicted for knowingly taking part in an unauthorised assembly during the annual July 1 rally at Causeway Bay.
The sentence was longer than any of the seven activists and former lawmakers, who were previously jailed for six months to a year over their roles in the same rally after pleading guilty.
Highlighting the gravity of Su’s offence, Magistrate Norton Pang Leung-ting cited the “secessionist” and “seditious” nature of the slogans chanted by hundreds of protesters who gathered in open defiance of a police order to disperse.
“Even though the case does not involve violence, I take the view that protesters had disturbed the peace of society,” Pang said. “This protest was capable of advocating and inciting the repudiation of, and hate for, both the government and police.”
The annual rally in 2020, which was banned for the first time since the city’s handover to China in 1997, marked the first large-scale protest after the national security law was imposed the day before to criminalise acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.