Is jailing of fugitives’ relatives going to become a pattern?

Fugitive activist Anna Kwok’s 68-year-old father is arrested and detained in jail for allegedly ‘attempting to deal with, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources belonging to, or owned or controlled by, a relevant absconder’. Her brother was also reportedly taken in and released on bail…

It is the first time Hong Kong authorities have charged a family member of a wanted activist under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, more commonly known as Article 23.

It is also the first prosecution for the offence that is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

According to the charge sheet, between January 4 and February 27, Kwok Yin-sang is said to have attempted to obtain funds from a life and personal accident insurance policy that belonged to Anna Kwok – who is wanted by Hong Kong authorities for suspected foreign collusion.

More on ‘absconders’. From Australia’s (paywalled) Age, the tale of how a Hong Kong lawmaker came to be an Adelaide lawyer…

To his friends and colleagues in Adelaide, he’s just Ted. To the Chinese and Hong Kong governments, Ted Hui Chi-fung is a traitor guilty of numerous heinous crimes. In Hong Kong, wanted posters for Hui have hung from noticeboards outside police stations.

In Australia, he’s the target of patriotic Chinese thugs and foreign interference campaigns…

In Hong Kong, before leaving for good…

Hui was regularly followed home from work by security officials. By July 2020, his office had been raided three times in six months.

“I was in a dangerous situation,” he recalls. “I knew that the rules of the game had changed and that this was their new tactic, that they would come up with new things and they would use whatever means to put you in jail.”

Beijing had begun implementing a new national security law, which gave the Chinese government unprecedented powers to sentence those deemed guilty of subversion to life imprisonment. In August, Hui was arrested after participating in a small protest in a local park in Tuen Mun, his childhood suburb, 11 kilometres south of the border with the mainland. He posted bail, but the Hong Kong police confiscated his passport.

And then…

COVID had shut the world’s borders. Zoom had killed in-person conferences. “For the first couple of weeks, we tried to look for real meetings to invite him to,” says [Danish activist] Storgaard. “But there were none. So we decided, ‘Let’s just make an invitation.’ ”

Storgaard, then 26, and his then 25-year-old friend Thomas Rohden, now a regional councillor for the Social-Liberal Party, got on the phone to their contacts in the Danish parliament. They rang non-government organisations, environmental groups and two Danish MPs, the Independent Greens’ Uffe Elbæk and the Conservative People’s Party’s Katarina Ammitzbøll. They convinced them to sign off on the official letter inviting Hui to a series of meetings and conferences that did not exist.

But quarantine would have prevented his scheduled court appearance on return to Hong Kong…

“So within four hours, Thomas and I had to call all the parliamentarians and NGOs and just ask them again, ‘We have this situation, we are trying to get this guy out of Hong Kong. If somebody calls you and contacts you from China, are you willing to say you’re going to have a meeting with this guy?’ And to my surprise, everybody said yes…”

…Hui did not tell Storgaard that he, too, harboured a secret: he was also going to smuggle his family out of Hong Kong.

Renee Xia, director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a US-based NGO, says the “Chinese government’s collective punishment of human rights defenders’ families appears to be a state policy”. Hui says, “My family didn’t want me to come back. They said even though we’re in trouble, they didn’t believe the regime would keep them in jail for a very long time.”

Hui was determined to avoid that outcome. “I didn’t want them to be held hostage,” he says.

Quite a story. No wonder the authorities are massively miffed about his success in fleeing. They won’t fall for it again.

A couple more HKFP pieces you might have missed…

Hong Kong falls to 140th place in the 2025 Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index…

The free expression NGO said: “The main factor behind this decline is the deterioration of the political indicator (-7.28 pts), notably due to the September 2024 conviction for ‘sedition’ of Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, former editors of Stand News. This is the first sedition case against the media since the UK handed over the territory in 1997.”

And an op-ed on the Hung Hom marina proposal. What or who are such marinas for? Whatever the answer, local residents don’t come into it.