A Hong Kong court on Saturday sentenced five speech therapists to 19 months in prison over children’s books deemed to be seditious, in a case that rights defenders say marks a major blow to free speech amid a tightening of civil liberties in the Chinese territory.
On Wednesday, Lorie Lai, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Marco Fong were found guilty of “conspiracy to print, publish, distribute, display and/or reproduce seditious publications.”
Judge W. K. Kwok called the defendants’ actions “a brainwashing exercise with a view to guiding the very young children to accept their views and values, i.e. (Beijing) has no sovereignty over (Hong Kong).”
Yeung said in court on Saturday that her “only regret was that she had not published more picture books before her arrest,” according to court documents.
The charges center around a set of books telling the stories of a village of sheep resisting a pack of wolves invading their home — a storyline that the government prosecutors alleged was meant to provoke contempt of the local government and China’s central government in Beijing.
Credit: cnn.com
