Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in prison

Hong Kong’s High Court has sentenced media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison in the most high-profile national security case in Beijing’s crackdown on the territory.

Lai, a 78-year-old billionaire media entrepreneur and a British citizen, was a supporter of the pro-democracy movement that rocked Hong Kong in 2019 and has long been a staunch critic of China.

His trial has been closely watched around the world as a barometer of press and political freedoms in Hong Kong after authorities in the semi-autonomous territory and Beijing cracked down in response to the unrest.

Lai was convicted in December on two counts of conspiring to collude with a foreign power and one count of conspiring to publish seditious materials through his media group, the now-closed pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily. The foreign collusion charges were levied under the national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020.

The court said on Monday that it had “no doubt whatsoever” that the collusion charges “fall within the category of offences of a ‘grave nature’”. It added that the sedition charge also fell within “the most serious category of its type”. Lai had faced the possibility of life imprisonment under the national security law.

The sentence will dash hopes that President Donald Trump, who vowed to free Lai in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, or UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who according to Downing Street officials raised his case on a trip to Beijing last month, would be able to secure an earlier release.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the Trump administration urged the authorities to grant Lai humanitarian parole. 

Rubio said the sentence was an “unjust and tragic conclusion” to the case and showed that Beijing would “go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong”.

UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said that 20 years was “tantamount to a life sentence” for Lai. She called on authorities to “end his appalling ordeal and release him on humanitarian grounds”.

Nancy Pelosi, former US Speaker of the House of Representatives and one of the strongest critics of Chinese human rights abuses in Congress, said the sentence was a “direct assault on freedom of the press and the rule of law”.

“The world must speak with one voice: this outrageous political persecution must end and Jimmy Lai must be released immediately,” she said.

Lai can appeal against the sentence, though his legal team has not said whether he will do so. He is diabetic and suffers from heart palpitations. His family and international legal team have said that he risks dying in prison, given his health condition.

In a statement, his son Sebastien Lai said: “Sentencing my father to this draconian prison sentence is devastating for our family and life-threatening for my father. It signifies the total destruction of the Hong Kong legal system and the end of justice.”

John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the US House of Representatives’ China committee, said the sentence was “the latest stain on the human rights record of the Chinese Communist Party and the farce of its promise to uphold one country, two systems”.

Chinese authorities have portrayed Lai as a key agitator behind the unrest in 2019, which they have cast as an attempted “colour revolution”.

Prosecutors focused on meetings with US officials, which they said demonstrated Lai’s pursuit of sanctions on officials in China and Hong Kong and efforts to bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

China’s foreign ministry said Lai was “a principal planner and participant in a series of anti-China, destabilising activities in Hong Kong”.

“The central government firmly supports the HKSAR in safeguarding national security in accordance with the law and in punishing criminal acts that endanger national security,” the ministry said.

Hong Kong chief executive John Lee said in a Chinese-language statement on Facebook that “the heavy sentence . . . demonstrates the rule of law and justice”.

Eric Lai, a senior fellow at Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said Jimmy Lai was unlikely to be released on humanitarian grounds even if the US and UK stepped up pressure on Beijing, in light of “the regime’s sustained effort to portray Lai as an ‘enemy of the state’”.

“A reversal from the appellant court would contradict years of political theatre,” he said.

A heavy police presence surrounded the West Kowloon Law Courts Building, where numerous national security-related hearings have been held. Visitors to the courtroom could be heard crying out during the proceedings.

Lai was first arrested in 2020 and has already spent five years in detention. He was previously sentenced to a series of jail terms over his alleged involvement in a banned vigil in 2020 to mark the anniversary of the bloody suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square and “unauthorised” anti-government protests, as well as for alleged fraud at his media group Next Media.

His latest trial has lasted 156 days. Lai’s co-defendants, including two activists and six former Apple Daily employees, received sentences ranging from six years and three months to 10 years.

Additional reporting by Nian Liu in Beijing