A Hong Kong court is poised to deliver its verdict on Friday in the highly anticipated national security trial of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, two prominent activists who led the city's now-disbanded group that organized decades of annual candlelight vigils commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
The defendants, former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, have pleaded not guilty to inciting subversion. If convicted by the three government-vetted judges, who are scheduled to hand down the decision at 10 a.m. local time, they face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The trial, originally slated to run for 75 days, concluded its closing arguments on the 24th day, moving much quicker than anticipated. Another co-defendant in the case, Albert Ho, entered a guilty plea when the trial commenced in January, a decision that typically leads to a reduced sentence. If Lee and Chow are found guilty, they will be able to plead for leniency at a separate mitigation hearing and could be sentenced at a later date alongside Ho.
For three decades, the Alliance organized massive annual candlelight vigils in Hong Kong, drawing tens of thousands of people to remember the victims of the June 4, 1989, crackdown in Beijing, where hundreds or potentially thousands of people were killed as military tanks entered the city center. This historical event marked a turning point for modern China, cementing that its economic transformation would not be accompanied by political liberalization.
The vigils were banned in 2020 during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, just weeks before Beijing implemented a sweeping national security law aimed at quelling the massive anti-government protests of 2019. Beijing has maintained that the 2020 law was crucial for restoring stability to the territory. Since its enactment, numerous prominent activists, including pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, have been imprisoned, and dozens of civil society organizations have disbanded.
Prosecutors argued during the trial that the case was strictly legal rather than political. They contended that the Alliance sought to incite others to unlawfully overthrow the leadership of China's ruling Communist Party, pointing to the group's core demand to "ending one-party rule."
In his defense, Lee testified that the call to "ending one-party rule" was not an attempt to overthrow the party's leadership, but rather a push toward democracy that would allow citizens to choose their leaders, arguing that the Communist Party should not enforce "dictatorship."
Chow, a barrister who represented herself, argued that "ending one-party rule" meant dismantling a system where state power is completely unrestricted. She criticized the prosecution for turning the standards of right and wrong upside down.
In a Patreon post published on Thursday, Chow described the harsh conditions of her transport from prison to court, noting she was shackled in handcuffs, waist chains, and ankle chains, and walked by correctional officers "like a dog." Despite the looming verdict, she wrote, "Justice lives in the hearts of the people. There is no need to look up to this kind of top-down ruling, and one verdict doesn’t matter much."
Observers view the trial as a key indicator of the decline of free speech in Hong Kong, which was handed back to Chinese rule by Great Britain in 1997. Eric Lai, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, noted that subversion charges have historically been used by Beijing to target mainland human rights lawyers, activists, and intellectuals, such as the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Lai remarked, "We can see to what extent the court in Hong Kong falls into the level of the party-led judiciary in the mainland through the criminal verdict."
Before voting to disband in September 2021, the Alliance faced police demands for information under claims that the group was operating as a foreign agent. The Alliance rejected the accusations and refused to comply. This refusal led to Chow and two other core members receiving 4 1/2-month prison sentences in a separate 2023 case. However, the trio successfully overturned those convictions at Hong Kong's top court in 2025.
Since the lifting of pandemic restrictions, the former vigil site in Victoria Park has been occupied by carnivals hosted by pro-Beijing groups. Individuals who have attempted to independently mark the June 4 anniversary near the site have been detained and taken away by police.
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