Sawt Falasteen - Hong Kong sentences father of wanted activist to 8 months in jail

Kwok Yin-sang, 69, is the father of Anna Kwok, an overseas pro-democracy advocate with a HK$1 million ($128,000) bounty on her by the city's authorities since 2023.

Hong Kong later made it a crime under its homegrown national security law, passed in 2024, for anyone to deal with the funds or other financial assets of fugitives.

The elder Kwok became the first person to be convicted of this type of offence earlier this month in a case rights groups called an "alarming act of collective punishment".

Acting Principal Magistrate Cheng Lim-chi said on Thursday Kwok Yin-sang did not directly engage in acts endangering national security, but the nature of his actions was still serious.

Cheng denied his conviction amounted to the collective punishment of wanted activists' families, or that Kwok Yin-sang had been targeted because he was a relative.

Kwok Yin-sang attempted in 2025 to withdraw a balance of around US$11,000 by terminating an insurance policy he bought for his daughter when she was an infant.

Anna Kwok wrote in a social media post on Thursday that she had never exercised any control over the insurance, adding the case was "guilt by blood" and "transnational repression".

"To sentence my 69-year-old father under the pretext that his actions lowered the 'likelihood' of my return to stand trial is not justice; it is a judicial farce," she said.

Hong Kong's once-vibrant political opposition and civil society have been all but quashed since Beijing imposed a national security law on the city in 2020, a year after huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests.

The city later imposed its own additional law in 2024.

Hong Kong authorities have vowed to pursue overseas activists accused of endangering national security and have issued bounties on 34 people so far, an action decried by critics as transnational repression.

A total of 386 people had been arrested for various national security crimes as of the start of this month, with 176 of them convicted.

S.AbuJamous--SF-PST