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A Hong Kong teenager was ordered to spend 4 months in jail on Tuesday for insulting China’s nationwide flag and illegal meeting as Beijing more and more targets distinguished activists from the monetary hub. Tony Chung, a 19-year-old who led a now-disbanded pro-democracy group, was convicted earlier this month for throwing the Chinese flag to the bottom throughout scuffles exterior Hong Kong’s legislature in May 2019.While serving his sentence, Chung can be ready for trial over a cost of “secession”, which might land him life imprisonment based on the draconian nationwide safety regulation Beijing imposed on Hong Kong on 30 June. Chung is the primary public political determine prosecuted underneath the brand new safety regulation, which Beijing described as a “sword” to return “order and stability” to the monetary hub after seven months of huge, typically violent pro-democracy protests final yr.He was sentenced to 3 months every for insulting the nationwide flag and illegal meeting, and advised to serve 4 months behind bars.The teen can be going through separate prices of cash laundering and conspiring to publish seditious content material.Chung was arrested by plainclothes police reverse the US consulate in late October and had been remanded in custody since.Speculation has swirled that the authorities moved on Chung as a result of he hoped to ask for asylum on the US consulate in Hong Kong.CrackdownAn rising variety of pro-democracy activists throughout the political spectrum have fled Hong Kong since Beijing stepped up its crackdown on town’s protests in opposition to China’s authoritarian rule.Under the safety regulation, dissenting speech as an alternative of acts will be alleged of imprecise but extreme offences like “subversion” and “collusion with foreign forces”. The regulation has additionally toppled the authorized firewall between Hong Kong’s internationally recognised widespread regulation judiciary and the opaque, Party-controlled justice system in mainland China by permitting extradition of suspects throughout the border for trial. Last Sunday, China’s state TV CGTN reported that Hong Kong police had put 30 people who find themselves not at present in Hong Kong on its wished record for suspicion of breaching the nationwide safety regulation, together with self-exiled activists Ted Hui and Baggio Leung.Prominent activists stay in Hong Kong have both been — jailed like Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow — or face frequent arrests and a number of prices.Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy media mogul who can be charged with the nationwide safety regulation, has been positioned underneath home arrest and stripped of public speech — his Twitter account included — as Hong Kong’s High Court granted him bail final week. The determination, nevertheless, provoked severe criticism from China, which threatened to extradite Lai to the mainland for trial.
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