Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and mogul Jimmy Lai sentenced

The prominent pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai has been found guilty on all three charges he faced by a Hong Kong national security court.

The 855-page verdict — issued more than five years after he was first arrested in 2020 — was delivered to a packed courtroom that included Lai’s wife, one of his sons, and Cardinal Joseph Zen, who baptized Lai.

Judge Esther Toh said Lai had been found guilty on two counts of colluding with foreign forces by seeking out meetings with foreign officials, including with American leaders, and advocating for sanctions on China. Lai was also found guilty on a sedition charge under a separate, colonial-era law.

Pro-democracy activist groups and western governments criticized the verdict, with many including the UK calling for Lai’s immediate release.

“The Hong Kong court has been compromised and has been politicized in the past five years,” said Frances Hui, policy and advocacy coordinator at the pro-democracy advocacy group Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. “I think this trial or this verdict is another stamp of proof that the court system is no longer the system that we once respected.”

A date for Lai’s sentencing will be announced later. Lai’s defense team has not commented on the verdict.

Lai had initially been arrested in August 2020 under a national security law Beijing imposed in Hong Kong, largely in response to mass 2019 anti-government protests in which Lai was active.

Hong Kong’s national security office has arrested hundreds of people under the national security law, which punishes broad buckets of dissenting behavior with up to life in prison. Critics of the law say it has all but squelched any remaining dissent in the region.

Earlier this year, student leader Joshua Wong was hit with new national security charges while already in prison on other charges related to his political activism. In 2024, Hong Kong sent 45 lawmakers and activists to prison for up to a decade on national security charges as well.

But Lai’s trial, which kicked off in 2023, has attracted intense international attention, because of Beijing’s insistence that he had been instrumental in orchestrating much of the 2019 anti-Beijing demonstrations. He is also the only defendant in the case who has not pled guilty.

“He believed there must be someone to stay behind to show the rest of the world that Hong Kongers are willing to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party no matter how huge the cost will be,” Finn Lau, a Hong Kong political activist who once worked with Lai and who had been implicated in his national security case, said.

Before his verdict on Monday, Lai was also sentenced to and had serving two back-to-back 14-month prison stints on other, protest-related charges.

Family members have said Lai, a devout Catholic, has been sustained by his faith and by the study of scripture after having spent more than 1,800 days of solitary confinement, much of it as his own request, according to the Hong Kong government.

But they also say Lai’s health has declined substantially during the last five years in prison through Hong Kong’s sweltering summers and damp winters, and say that he is suffering from advanced diabetes and heart palpitations.

Lai’s astonishing rise as a child stowaway in Hong Kong to one of the region’s richest men, having made a fortune in fast fashion, took another pivot when he switched to media. He helped found Apple Daily, a popular investigative tabloid, which authorities raided, then shut down in 2021. Nine Apple Daily editors and writers were later arrested under the National Security Law.