Protesters Found Guilty in Hong Kong

The trial’s main allegation was hardly earthshaking: obstruction of a public sidewalk.

Those in the dock were protesters with forgettable names and no prior records. They constitute a group so small that they hadn’t even required a police permit to gather and had taken up only a fraction of a little-used 36-foot-wide sidewalk, one of the widest in Hong Kong.

Yet the trial that ended in a Hong Kong courtroom Thursday with the conviction and fining of all 16 defendants still packed in a crowd. It had dragged on for 26 days and was handled by a senior government prosecutor.

The reason for all the attention: The demonstrators were members of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement for which Chinese President Jiang Zemin appears to have developed an intense and deeply personal loathing. And the bit of sidewalk they chose for their March 14 protest was in front of the Beijing government’s liaison office in Hong Kong.

The result was Hong Kong’s first criminal trial involving Falun Gong practitioners, clearly a sensitive issue for authorities here. The officials administer the former British colony as a quasi-autonomous special administrative region of China with greater human rights and more political freedom than the mainland. But authorities in Hong Kong have shown themselves at times almost desperate to please the central government in Beijing.

Falun Gong has been branded as an evil cult and outlawed elsewhere in China, but followers are free to practice in Hong Kong. Although they meet openly in parks, they also have undergone sporadic harassment and tend to be penned in whenever Jiang visits the region.

Thursday, in a carefully worded verdict that took more than two hours to read, Magistrate Symon Wong underscored the rights of assembly and freedom of expression that are guaranteed under Hong Kong’s Basic Law.

“These are long-standing rights that the court will ensure will be respected, preserved and protected,” he said. But Wong added that “those rights are not absolute.”

He declared all 16 defendants guilty of causing an obstruction. He also found that nine had committed the more serious offense of obstructing the police, who broke up the protest. Three were convicted of assaulting a police officer. None of the defendants was jailed; instead, they received fines ranging from $167 to $487.

Falun Gong supporters and human rights advocates quickly denounced the ruling as a threat to freedom in Hong Kong.

“How can we tell the world we’re a free society?” asked Law Yuk-kai, director of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, an independent watchdog group. Hong Kong officials “don’t care about rights or protecting the public. They are protecting the egos of mainland leaders.”

Falun Gong spokeswoman Sophie Xiao said the group planned to meet with lawyers later today to discuss a possible appeal.

Four of those convicted are Swiss, one is from New Zealand, and the rest are Hong Kong Chinese. They sat quietly in the courtroom as the verdict was read--first in English, then in Cantonese, Mandarin and German.

“This is not obstruction, it’s persecution,” said Leeshei Lemish, a Falun Gong practitioner who traveled from California to lend moral support to the defendants.

Others disagreed.

“We should respect the verdict,” declared Ma Lik, a prominent local pro-Beijing political figure and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s assembly.

“According to the law, everyone has the freedom to express their opinions but their action cannot obstruct other people.”

Ironically, all but a narrow stretch of the sidewalk in question had been roped off and torn up for improvement Thursday. The space available for pedestrians to pass the construction site was smaller than what was left by the demonstrators in March.

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Special correspondent Tammy Wong contributed to this report.