HONG KONG: Hong Kong authorities have detained a 40-year-old person on suspicion of using seditious phrases following a flag using a prohibited protest motto was spotted hanging out his flat.
Police obtained a report on Monday by a passerby who seen the flag position the prohibited motto”Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of the days” hanging out of a laundry stand away from the apartment at the Mong Kok area in Kowloon, authorities said Tuesday.
Officers detained the man, who remains in detention, police stated.
He wasn’t identified.
When charged and convicted of sedition, first time criminals encounter some 5,000 Hong Kong dollar ($644) good and 2 years’ imprisonment.
The motto”Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of the days” was frequently chanted by protesters through weeks of anti-government demonstrations in 2019 since they needed broader democratic liberty during a period when China started devoting more control on the semi-autonomous city.
The authorities afterwards resisted the motto following the execution of a difficult national security legislation, which criminalizes subversion, secession, terrorism, and international collusion threatening national security.
The legislation covers protester activities such as forecasts for Hong Kong freedom.
A government note released last July reported that the”Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of the times” motto connotates a phone for liberty and subversion of state authority.
“When the authorities have reasonable suspicion (of sedition), by hanging out a flag stating’Liberate Hong Kong’ did this mean to liberate Hong Kong individuals from the present regime? That might be seditious,” stated pro-Beijing lawmaker Regina Ip.
“I can not state that the authorities have overreacted.
But finally whether that individual has committed the crime of sedition, that’s for the courts to determine,” she explained.
Authorities have broken down on dissent from town because the 2019 protests, devoting 100 individuals under the federal safety legislation and bringing charges from the majority of the town’s leading pro-democracy activists, lots of whom are currently behind bars or even have fled overseas.
Last week, authorities arrested five leading executives and editors in the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and devoting $2.3 million in resources of 3 businesses related to the newspaper.
The paper states it might need to shut this Saturday as a outcome.
On Tuesday, a Hong Kong court convicted lawyer Samuel Bickett from the alleged attack of a plainclothes police officer in 2019.
The altercation ensued when Bickett watched the officer with his baton to prevent a guy who’d jumped the turnstiles in a subway station.
At a video broadcasting on social networking, a person named as Bickett was spotted wrestling with an officer and trying to shoot his baton away.
Bickett was refused bail and remanded in custody before the sentencing .
On Wednesday, Tong Ying-kit, that flew a flag with all the demonstration motto when driving his bike into a bunch of police officers last July, would be to go on trial for supposedly inciting secession.
He’s the first man to stand trial under the federal security law because the law came into effect last June.