HONG KONG • Hong Kong's highest court freed three young leaders of the city's pro-democracy movement yesterday, including the public face of the protests, Joshua Wong, in a stark reversal of an earlier ruling - but it warned against future acts of dissent.
The unanimous decision was made by a panel of five judges on the Chinese-ruled city's Court of Final Appeal, led by Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma. Wong, 21, Nathan Law and Alex Chow had served roughly two months in jail before they were granted bail in November.
Earlier, a magistrate's court had ruled that the activists should serve community service and a suspended sentence for a charge of "unlawful assembly" after they and others stormed into a fenced-off area in front of government headquarters in September 2014.
That sparked a night-long standoff with police, seen as a key trigger for the "Umbrella Movement" that blocked major roads for 79 days in a push for full democracy, presenting Communist Party rulers in Beijing with one of their biggest political challenges in decades.
The non-jail sentence was challenged by Hong Kong's Department of Justice, which eventually led to the Court of Appeal imposing jail terms. Sentences of six to eight months were handed down last August, the South China Morning Post reported.
The five judges yesterday, including a non-permanent foreign judge, Lord Leonard Hoffmann, said they had "quashed the sentences of imprisonment".
They stressed, however, that Hong Kong was a law-abiding society and that "future offenders involved in large-scale unlawful assemblies involving violence" will be subject to stricter guidelines laid down by the Court of Appeal.
The former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with a guarantee of wide-ranging freedoms, including an independent judiciary and freedom of speech, but critics accuse Beijing of creeping interference and the government of toeing the Beijing line.
REUTERS
