Police staked out a bathroom in order to catch an autistic 18/19-year-old for scrawling ‘seditious words’ on the wall. The guy worked part-time as a clerk for the Vanuatu consulate…
Magistrate Victor So handed down judgement on Wednesday morning at West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court, Sing Tao Daily reported.
The magistrate did not accept a psychiatric report submitted earlier by the defence, which stated that the defendant showed symptoms of autism and that stress caused by poor examination results triggered his dissociative disorder.
Leung [Kai-lok] was arrested in July last year by national security police. He was accused of leaving seditious messages on the wall of a male bathroom inside China Hong Kong City in Tsim Sha Tsui on three occasions between July 17 and 21 when he worked as a part-time clerk at the Consulate of Vanuatu.
The seditious messages included “Bomb Li Ka-chiu to death” in Chinese, in an apparent reference to the city’s leader John Lee. He also scrawled the Chinese characters for “Gwong Si” – an abbreviated version of the 2019 protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the Revolution of Our Times.” Courts have ruled the phrase carries seditious intent.
SCMP reports…
A 19-year-old in Hong Kong has been convicted of sedition for writing anti-government graffiti in a commercial building toilet, violating the city’s domestic national security law.
West Kowloon Court on Wednesday rejected a defence psychiatrist’s opinion that a congenital mental disorder prevented Leung Kai-lok from understanding the offensive words he used against the government and police.
Leung stood trial earlier this year before a magistrate hand-picked by the city leader to oversee national security proceedings.
How many man-hours did the police spend valiantly ‘staking out’ the bathroom? Do cops feel they have done a good job after catching an autistic teenager this way? Is graffiti just vandalism or does it threaten the national security of the PRC? And who’d have thought Vanuatu had a consulate here?