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Koo had denied a cost of “making an attempt or getting ready to commit an act or acts with seditious intention,” public broadcaster RTHK reported.
Previous to his sentence, Koo had been held in custody for greater than 5 months after being denied bail on nationwide safety grounds.
Hong Kong’s sedition regulation was launched by the British colonial authorities in 1938, outlawing “hatred or contempt or disaffection” towards the monarch and the colonial administration. It remained on the statutes after town was handed over to China in 1997.
Unused for many years, the regulation has been revived by Hong Kong prosecutors amid Beijing’s broad crackdown on civil society following town’s 2019 pro-democracy protests.
In a single high-profile ongoing case, 5 speech therapists have been accused of “conspiracy to distribute seditious supplies” for publishing a sequence of kids’s image books.
Sedition carries a most sentence of two years in jail for a primary offense and three years for a subsequent conviction.
Critics have accused the Hong Kong authorities of turning to the sedition regulation — together with a extra lately launched nationwide safety regulation — to clamp down on dissent.
The Hong Kong authorities has repeatedly defended the nationwide safety laws, saying it restored order to town following the widespread pro-democracy protests.
The nationwide safety regulation was enacted in 2020 and outlaws acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with overseas forces — with a most sentence of life in jail.
Two years after its introduction, no opposition lawmakers stay within the Hong Kong legislature, whereas almost all the metropolis’s main pro-democracy figures, together with activists and politicians, have both been pressured into exile or imprisoned — with dozens of them behind bars.
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