The Hong Kong government announced on Thursday a rejection of a petition lodged by ten overseas Catholic Church leaders. This appeal called for the immediate and unprecedented release of pro-democracy enthusiast and media mogul, Jimmy Lai, from prison. The authorities stated that the Catholic leaders made hurtful and disrespectful pronouncements about Hong Kong and meddled improperly in the region’s domestic affairs.
The petition, initiated on November 1st by ten bishops of the Catholic Church from an assortment of countries, which include the U.S., Australia, India, and Nigeria, urged the Hong Kong government to relieve the 75-year-old Lai from imprisonment. The justification for this included that Lai should not be further victimized for endorsing pro-democracy pursuits. In addition to this, they declared, “There is no place for such cruelty and oppression in a territory that claims to uphold the rule of law and respect the right to freedom of expression.”
Despite these pleas, the Hong Kong government dismissed the petition and categorized it as “misleading and slanderous”. As part of an official response, they averred: “Any person, irrespective of their identity, who attempts to interfere with the judicial proceedings in Hong Kong with the objective of aiding a defendant’s elusion of the criminal justice procedure, is flagrantly underminig the rule of law in Hong Kong … we emphatically plead with the foreign Catholic leaders to discriminate facts from fallacy and immediately cease any interference in Hong Kong’s domestic affairs and the independent operation of its judiciary power.”
The Secretary for Justice, Paul Lam Ting-kwok, expressed on Friday that the appeal violated the fundamental essence of the rule of law by trying to obstruct Hong Kong’s justice system. He held that the petition would consolidate Hong Kong’s legal and judicial sectors and affirmed that the legal system in Hong Kong would persist in upholding the rule of law.
On December 10, 2022, the Hong Kong District Court sentenced Lai to nearly six years in prison on fraud charges, adding to a pre-existing 20-month prison term for involvement in commemorating victims of the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. Lai is expected to be trialed at the High Court on December 18 over charges relating to the National Security Law. Earlier this year, in May, the same court dismissed an attempt by Lai to rescind a decision that deterred his British counsel from taking on his National Security Law litigation.