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Hong Kong’s High Court has sentenced media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison, in the most high-profile national security case in Beijing’s crackdown on the territory.
Lai, a 78-year-old billionaire media entrepreneur, was a supporter of the pro-democracy movement that rocked Hong Kong in 2019, and has long been a staunch critic of China.
His trial has been closely watched around the world as a barometer of press and political freedoms in Hong Kong after authorities in the semi-autonomous territory and in Beijing cracked down in response to the unrest.
Last month, Lai was convicted on two counts of conspiring to collude with a foreign power and one count of conspiring to publish seditious materials through his media group, the now closed pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily. The foreign collusion charges were levied under the national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020.
He had faced the possibility of life imprisonment under the national security law.
The sentence will dash hopes that US President Donald Trump, who vowed “100 per cent” to free Lai in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, or UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who, according to Downing Street officials, raised his case on a trip to Beijing last month, would be able to secure an earlier release. Lai is a British citizen.
Lai is diabetic and suffers from heart palpitations, and his family and international legal team have said that he risks dying in prison given his health condition.
At a mitigation hearing last month, Lai’s legal team in Hong Kong also argued that a longer sentence would have a greater impact given his age, saying: “Any day in the prison will bring him much closer to the end of his life.”
Chinese authorities have portrayed Lai as a key agitator behind the 2019 protests, which were sparked by a local extradition bill but swelled into a wider movement opposed to Beijing’s expanding influence in the city. Hong Kong operates a separate legal infrastructure from mainland China under the “one country, two systems” arrangement governing its handover from British administration in 1997.
Prosecutors in Hong Kong focused on Lai’s meetings between US officials, which they said pointed to his efforts to get the US to impose sanctions on officials in China and Hong Kong in order to bring down the Chinese Communist Party.
Lai was first arrested in 2020 and has already spent five years in detention. He was previously sentenced to a series of jail terms over his alleged involvement in a banned vigil in 2020 to mark the anniversary of the bloody suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square and “unauthorised” anti-government protests, as well as for alleged fraud at his media group Next Media.
His latest trial has lasted 156 days.
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