A Hong Kong court heard final arguments Monday in the trial against the jailed Catholic publisher Jimmy Lai, with prosecutors saying Lai’s international connections proved his “unwavering intent” to bring international sanctions against China and Hong Kong.
Jimmy Lai Chee-ying arrives at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts, May 2020. Credit: Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo
Lai, who has been in prison since 2020, is accused of colluding with foreign powers and publishing seditious materials under Beijing’s controversial National Security Law, imposed in Hong Kong in 2020.
If convicted, Lai faces life in prison. However, the publisher’s former senior executive and close friend told The Pillar that a conviction seems inevitable, and those close to Lai hope it could clear the way for his eventual release from prison and deportation.
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Lai founded Apple Daily in 1995, a news publication which became particularly critical of Hong Kong’s government in the wake of a controversial 2019 bill to extradite locals to the mainland for trial in political cases. The bill caused widespread protests and demonstrations and Lai was arrested in 2020.
Apple Daily was one of the last pro-democracy newspapers in Hong Kong publicly critical of the erosion of civil liberties protected in Hong Kong’s Basic Law and expected to be guaranteed after the handover of the Hong Kong territory from the UK in 1997.
The newspaper was forced in 2021 to close, after the government froze assets belonging to Lai and his media company, and raided the newspaper’s offices, arresting several editors.
Lai has repeatedly cited his Catholic faith as a motivating and sustaining force in his ongoing trials. Since his initial arrest, Lai has received numerous awards and accolades from both Catholic and secular institutions, including the 2020 Freedom of the Press Award from Reporters Without Borders.
He has been in prison, largely in solitary confinement, since 2020, with The Pillar previously reporting that he had been denied regular access to the sacraments while in prison.
When the National Security Law was imposed, Lai called it the “death knell” of rule of law in Hong Kong. Soon after he was arrested and jailed on national security charges, he called his imprisonment “the pinnacle of [his] life.”
The prosecution has made Lai’s connections with foreign officials and politicians the center of the case, alleging that he used them to lobby foreign governments to impose sanctions on China and Hong Kong, a crime under the National Security Law.
“We submit that all these foreign connections and foreign collaborations show [Lai’s] unwavering intent to solicit SBHA from foreign countries,” lead prosecutor Anthony Chau said during the arguments. “These collaborations are long-term and persistent.”
The prosecutor named Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense, and Mary Kissel, an advisor to then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo, as examples of Lai’s foreign connections.
In his own testimony in November 2024, Lai denied that he had asked Pompeo and then vice president Mike Pence to take action against Hong Kong and China amid the 2019 protests.
Lai was asked last year to explain his account activity on twitter.com, having in 2020 reposted a tweet from Benedict Rogers, head of the London-based human rights group Hong Kong Watch. In the tweet, Rogers called for the U.K. government to impose sanctions on members of the Hong Kong government, then led by the then-chief executive Carrie Lam.
Addressing the panel of three judges hearing the case in 2024, Lai said that he had not personally reposted Rogers’ comments via his own account, and at that time most of the content on his Twitter page was managed by a columnist at Apple Daily.
Lai said that his content on the Twitter site was mostly drafted and posted by Simon Lee, who the court had previously heard left Hong Kong in July of 2020 and expressed concerns about managing Lai’s Twitter presence following the imposition of the National Security Law that year.
Lai’s case does not involve a jury. Arguments are heard by a panel of judges picked by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, John Lee, the sole Beijing-approved candidate for the 2022 election for the post.
Speaking to The Pillar, Mark Simon, formerly a senior executive at Apple Daily and a close associate of Lai’s, said that while the outcome of the trial was seen as a forgone conclusion, Lai’s friends and family hoped its conclusion could clear the way for his release on humanitarian grounds.
“Jimmy’s trial is ongoing, but it is going to end,” Simon said. “And that is when we hope Beijing will start to step in and take a little bit more notice. We know the verdict, when it comes, is going to be guilty. But in a sense we are starting from that eventual ‘guilty’ and hopefully working from there to get him released.”
“I don’t think Jimmy ever thought he could win his case. He and I discussed it. He always knew he was going to be found guilty. The family knew that, too. But Jimmy’s point was always that he’s not going to plead guilty. He was never going to say ‘I did it,’” said Simon.
“Everything he’s accused of doing wasn’t against the law until after they passed the [National Security Law], and then even [the prosecution] accept he hadn’t been doing anything for six or seven months prior to the law coming in.”
Simon noted that the 77-year-old Lai’s health had deteriorated significantly over his years of incarceration and that the effects were visible.
“He’s a tough guy, and he can hold on for a while, but his condition is deteriorating pretty rapidly,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see, but the hope is that they will convict and then move to deport him. That’s what we need to see for his health, and it is what the authorities need to do from their own perspective. They need to get this behind them.”
Lai appeared in court this week wearing a heart monitor following the advice of doctors, who have confirmed the downturn in his health. According to Simon, this has made what already appeared to many observers to be a show-trail take on an element of absurdity.
“It’s a kind of cosplay,” he said. “Every time Jimmy comes to court, they have a four truck convoy to bring him in. They have guys with machine guns on guard. It’s ridiculous — a 77-year-old guy who’s now wearing an EKG vest because of his heart condition and they act like there is a Seal Team Six ready to bust him out. It’s just the way things are right now.”
The closing arguments had been twice delayed last week due to bad weather and later Lai’s health issues, who had complained about “heart palpitations” and moments in which he felt like “collapsing,” according to his attorney.
During the trial, prosecutors have sought to portray Lai as a political “radical,” accusing him of conspiring with Western powers in the wake of the widespread 2019 civil rights demonstrations in Hong Kong and using his now-closed newspaper to call for “foreign countries, in particular the [United States], to impose sanctions, blockades or [undertake] other hostile activities” against both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland government.
The substance of the charges Lai faces is that his newspaper’s coverage of the shifting legal situation in Hong Kong, and the government’s crackdown on freedom of the press and civil liberties, amounts to sedition against the state. He faces life imprisonment if convicted.
Lai has already been convicted of participating in a banned demonstration in 2019, when Hong Kong saw widespread pro-democracy protests against government plans to bring in a law that would have allowed political prisoners to be extradited to the mainland to face trial. The demonstration in question was a prayer vigil to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, an annual event previously permitted in Hong Kong but now banned.
That extradition bill was subsequently dropped by the Hong Kong government. But in 2020, the mainland government imposed a new National Security Law on the special administrative region.
According to Simon, though, while Lai’s initial arrest and imprisonment — initially on charges that Apple Daily had violated the terms of a lease on its corporate headquarters — were first seen as a way for the government to silence dissent, his continued incarceration was now proving a problem for authorities.
Several Western leaders, including President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer have voiced their support for Lai’s release.
According to Simon, while world leaders highlighting Lai’s cause could be seen as lending support to the prosecution’s allegations of foreign collusion, these interventions could help pressure the government to release and deport Lai after the trial concludes.
“I think it doesn’t really behoove the authorities to have a fight with both Kier Starmer and Trump both right now,” he said “It’s hard for them, for the economic situation in Hong Kong.”
“It’s hard for companies to overcome this, especially with young employees. Now, people don’t want to go to Hong Kong and you don’t see what I would call the ‘standard defense’ lines you used to get of Hong Kong — that everything is fine, really. People know there’s a problem, and there are wider economic headwinds in China more generally,” Simon told The Pillar.
“For Hong Kong, the problem is can you be an international city with political prisoners held for dubious reasons? The answer is you can’t — maybe the expectation was you could get away from it for a time, when China’s economy looked to be forever rising, but we aren’t there anymore,” he said.
“And I think with Jimmy, the real issue is he is 77. The Chinese do take into account age, even in their justice system on the mainland. So the idea that Hong Kong can carve out their own private rule is probably not going to strike a lot of people as correct,” said Simon.
“We have the hope that the Hong Kong government and Beijing realize that this is a counterproductive effort now and see releasing Jimmy makes the most sense. It’s the humanitarian thing to do, and also the politically smart thing to do: Once a dissident leaves oppression, the world moves on a little. But if the dissident dies in jail, the world fixates, he becomes a martyr.”
“The problem is, the government’s logic has been that they have to repress Jimmy to keep the rest of Hong Kong down. The simple fact is that in Hong Kong, most of the ‘troublemakers’ have left. So the idea that you have to keep Jimmy in jail to keep Hong Kong calm, that you have to ‘imprison the chicken to scare the monkeys’ doesn’t apply anymore, and so their logic has disappeared,” said Simon. “I think Beijing is starting to see that.”
Since its imposition on Hong Kong by the mainland government, the National Security Law has been used to arrest and prosecute several prominent Catholic pro-democracy advocates, including Lai, as well as the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen.
At the time of Lai’s initial arrest in December of 2020, Cardinal Zen called the move “obviously a case of political intimidation.”
“This is evidently all about political persecution,” Zen said in an interview at the time. “Jimmy Lai is obviously the one who runs the only newspaper which is still completely free.”
“So, there is a clear policy direction: suppress the freedom of expression,” said the cardinal.
While the cardinal was originally held on national security grounds, including alleged collusion with foreign agents, he was ultimately charged only with failing to register the humanitarian fund through the proper channels — though the National Security Law charges remain unpursued by prosecutors, meaning they are effectively in legal cold storage.
Jimmy Lai’s trial continues.
