Hong Kong Reaches a Grim Milestone:
1,000 Political Prisoners
In its debut research report, “Hong Kong Reaches a Grim Milestone,” HKDC examines a new, troubling phenomenon in Hong Kong: the exponential growth in the number of political prisoners since the start of the 2019 mass protests.
In under three years, the city has gone from having only a handful of political prisoners to recently crossing the 1,000 mark, rivaling Belarus, Burma and Cuba, other authoritarian societies. The aggregated length of sentences exceeds 772 years, while more than half of the political prisoners are under 25 year-old. Meanwhile, remand has risen as a means of keeping political opponents in long-term pre-trial detention – the average time on remand is 16.6 months.
The report is supplemented by the Hong Kong Political Prisoners Database, maintained and regularly updated by HKDC to facilitate human rights monitoring and advocacy.
Public Database
“There have been 1,014 political prisoners in Hong Kong from June 9, 2019, to May 10, 2022… Hong Kong now has one of fastest-growing populations of political prisoners in the world, rivaling Belarus, Burma, and Cuba, other societies where authoritarian governments have recently cracked down on protest movements… Overall, this situation constitutes no less than a grave human rights crisis.”
The Hong Kong Political Prisoners Database (HKPPD) is a long-term project launched by HKDC to monitor the rise of Hong Kong political prisoners, raise their profile internationally, and demand action from a multitude of actors.
The Hong Kong Political Prisoners Database (HKPPD)
Hong Kong was not supposed
to look like this
"There are now more than 1,000 political prisoners languishing in Hong Kong’s jails, among them activists, students, journalists and lawyers. Dozens have been jailed for a year or longer without bail in the legal limbo of “pretrial detention.” Some 47 opposition politicians face possible life in prison because they participated in a primary election, considered subversive in the new Hong Kong.
[...] In 2022, Hong Kong looks more like China — repressive, intolerant of dissent, suspicious of foreigners and bent on indoctrinating the entire population with an enforced loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and its whitewashed view of history."
By Keith B. Richburg on The Washington Post
