The imprisonment of occupy student leaders: Public reactions and debates over Hong Kong's judicial independence

• Published in: China perspectives 2017-01, Vol.2017 (4), p.59-62
• Main Author: Yu, Ting-Fai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chinese; Great Britain. Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Judicial independence; London School of Economics and Political Science; Politics and government
• ISSN: 2070-3449; 1996-4617
• DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.7490

On 17 August 2017, three prominent Occupy leaders, Alex Chow Yong-kang, Nathan Law Kwun-chung, and Joshua Wong Chi-fung, were found guilty of unlawful assembly and handed prison sentences of six to eight months for storming Civic Square (the government headquarters) on 26 September 2014, setting off a series of sit-in protests over the next 79 days that configured into the Umbrella Movement (see, e.g. Kwok and Chan 2017; Ng 2016). In an earlier trial at the Eastern Magistrates' Court in August 2016, Magistrate June Cheung Tin-ngan, who considered the offense different from ordinary criminal cases, sentenced Law and Wong to community service orders while giving Chow a suspended jail sentence so he could commence his study overseas. (1) Deeming the lower court's judgment too lenient, the Department of Justice applied for judicial review in hopes of pushing for harsher punishments. On the basis that the initial trial "did not consider that the sentence should have a deterrent element, while giving disproportionate weight to factors such as personal circumstances and the respondents' motives," (2) the Court of Appeal justified its intervention by arguing that the magistrate disregarded the seriousness of the case and erred in granting community service orders.