A court docket in Hong Kong on Friday sentenced a outstanding on-line radio host to 2 years and eight months in jail for sedition and cash laundering, fees he confessed to in a plea deal.
Previous to his February 2021 arrest, Edmund Wan Yiu-sing, recognized by his DJ title “Giggs,” hosted applications that reported and commented on Hong Kong and Chinese language politics for D100, an unbiased on-line radio station. Wan additionally as soon as hosted a program for RFA’s Cantonese Service from 2017 to 2020.
Authorities charged that Wan hosted applications that “incited others to withstand or overthrow the Chinese language Communist Occasion” and “promoted Hong Kong independence,” the Hong Kong Free Press unbiased information outlet reported.
Final month, Wan pleaded responsible to at least one cost of seditious intent for on-air feedback he made in 2020, and three fees of cash laundering associated to crowd funding transactions. In alternate, six different fees have been left on file, which suggests they can’t be pursued with out the court docket’s permission.
The fees come below a regulation, created when Hong Kong was below British rule, that defines sedition as “intent to arouse hatred or contempt of the Hong Kong [government] or to incite rise up, and trigger dissatisfaction with it.”
The sedition regulation was revived by the administration of Chief Govt Carrie Lam in the course of the 2019 protest motion and has been used to arrest pro-democracy activists.
The sentence was an instance of “Hong Kong authorities’ relentless efforts to silence political criticism by journalists,” Iris Hsu, China consultant for the New York-based Committee to Defend Journalists, mentioned in an announcement.
“The federal government ought to cease utilizing the colonial-era sedition regulation and obvious retaliatory fees of economic crimes in opposition to the press,” she mentioned.
The cash-laundering fees have been for utilizing his web site and social media accounts in February 2020 to name for donations to assist Hong Kongers who moved to Taiwan for examine.
Along with the time in jail, the court docket additionally ordered Wan at hand over HK$4.87 million (about U.S. $620,000) in belongings.