HONG KONG: Hong Kong police arrested a seventh particular person on Wednesday (Could 29) underneath its new safety regulation in relation to social media posts about commemorating Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Sq. crackdown.
The most recent arrest comes after an EU spokesperson mentioned regulation enforcement actions recommend the brand new laws “is used to stifle freedom of expression”.
Authorities mentioned the 53-year-old lady taken in was suspected of “offences in reference to seditious intention”, following the arrests of six folks over the identical case a day earlier.
Hong Kong’s safety chief had on Tuesday recognized a kind of arrested as Chow Grasp-tung, a outstanding activist who led the now-disbanded group that used to organise annual vigils to mark the Tiananmen Sq. incident.
The group of seven are the primary folks to be arrested underneath the “Safeguarding Nationwide Safety Ordinance” – generally known as Article 23 – which Hong Kong enacted in March and penalises sedition with as much as seven years in jail.
“The enforcement motion remains to be ongoing and the potential for additional arrests isn’t dominated out,” the Nationwide Safety Division of the Hong Kong Police mentioned Wednesday.
Hong Kong was the one place on Chinese language soil the place folks may overtly mourn those that died on Jun 4, 1989, when the federal government despatched troops and tanks to crush demonstrations in Beijing.
However commemoration has been pushed underground in Hong Kong since Beijing’s crackdown on dissent, following the massive and generally violent protests in 2019.
Earlier than Wednesday’s arrest, a spokesperson for the European Union mentioned the regulation enforcement motion “appear to substantiate the EU’s considerations concerning the new regulation and its impact on the rights and freedoms of the folks of Hong Kong”.
“Whereas we have to assess the main points of the person instances, the arrests recommend that the brand new regulation is used to stifle freedom of expression of the folks of Hong Kong.”
The EU “calls on the Hong Kong authorities to guard the flexibility of the folks of Hong Kong to train their rights and freedoms”, the spokesperson mentioned.
Handed by an opposition-free legislature, Article 23 grew to become Hong Kong’s second nationwide safety regulation, following a Beijing-imposed safety regulation that got here into impact in 2020.
America, the European Union, Japan and Britain have been amongst Article 23’s strongest critics.
