Hong Kongers sentenced to prison for publishing children’s books

Published on: 09/10/2022 – 13:05 Convicted of “sedition”, five Hong Kongers were sentenced on Saturday to 19 months in prison for publishing a series of children’s books, depicting the city’s pro-democracy supporters as sheep defending their village against wolves. A Hong Kong court on Saturday (September 10th) sentenced five speech therapists to 19 months in prison for publishing children’s books depicting pro-democracy activists as sheep facing wolves. They were found guilty of “sedition” on Wednesday, under of a law inherited from British colonization and used by current authorities to stifle dissent alongside the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.Lai Man-ling, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Fong Tsz- ho, all founding members of the speech therapists’ union behind the books, were kept in prison for more than a year before the trial. The books were published in 2020, just a year after the huge protests, often violence, of the pro-democracy movement. On Saturday, facing Judge Kwok Wai-kin, who once again described these publications as a “brainwashing exercise”, three of the five members said they had no regrets. The 5 illustrators who drew the Sheep Village Children Book got sentenced for 19 months imprisonment, this will further destroy freedom of artistic expression of Hong Kong, increase self-censorship and escalate brain drain away from Hong Kong. pic.twitter.com/OUTF7ala2Z— Kacey Wong (@KaceyWong15) September 10, 2022 Melody Yeung, 28, even assured that she still hopes to be on the side of the sheep. “My only regret is that I was not able to publish more books before I was arrested,” she told the court. Sidney Ng, 27, said through his lawyer that these lawsuits “had ) effect of intimidating civil society and alienating Hong Kongers from each other.” Prosecutors had argued that the picture books exhibited “anti-Chinese sentiment” and were intended to “incite readers’ hatred of the authorities in Mainland China”. With AFP