Australia ‘Deeply Concerned’ by Imprisonment of Hong Kong Journalists

Published on September 1, 2024

Foreign Minister Penny Wong says Australia is “deeply concerned” by the guilty verdicts handed down to two Hong Kong journalists accused of publishing seditious material in Stand News, an online news site that closed in December 2021. It had been one of the city’s last media outlets that openly criticised the government as it went about silencing dissent following widespread pro-democracy protests in 2019. “We have consistently raised with Hong Kong and China the widespread application of national security laws and repression of civil society and journalists,” Wong said in a post on X. The publication’s former Editor-in-Chief, Chung Pui-kuen, and its former acting Editor-in-Chief, Patrick Lam, were both arrested on Dec. 29, 2021, after police raided its newsroom. The convictions were the first to involve the media since Hong Kong returned to Beijing’s control in 1997....

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