Hong Kong pro is a Hong Kong-based professional sports league, which consists of 5 teams. Founded in 2011 by Francis Lau and Stephen Lee as the first eSports organization outside the mainland China, it has since become one of Asia’s most successful gaming leagues with more than 65% growth annually from last year alone.
According to Western news agencies, more than 200 Hong Kong police officers invaded the headquarters of the independent website Stand News on December 29 and detained the news organization’s directors. According to the Hong Kong Free Press, three ladies and three males were detained (HKFP). Denise Ho, a musician, pro-democracy activist, and former board member of Stand News, was among those jailed, according to the report.
The’most significant pro-democracy media outlet in Hong Kong’
The leaders were accused by the authorities of planning to spread seditious writings, according to the Guardian.
According to the organization’s Facebook page, the online newspaper is closed, its website will not be updated, and its social media postings will be erased within 24 hours. According to the Guardian, Stand News was the “most visible pro-democracy media platform.” Its collapse came months after the arrest of its founder Jimmy Lai and the loss of another prominent pro-democracy daily, the Apple Daily, according to The Guardian.
The Chinese state-run English-language tabloid Global Times claimed in a tweet that Hong Kong’s news media is being bolstered “to act in accordance with the law Journalists who “endanger national security” might “not anticipate any advantages,” according to the law “According to the tweet.
Following #StandNews, legal experts in #HK are urging media outlets to follow the law. They, like foreign journalists, have no right to demand special treatment or to exploit their freedom of expression to jeopardize national security. https://t.co/bAmAwvgaO8
— December 29, 2021, Global Times (@globaltimesnews)
According to The Guardian, sedition was not listed in the mainland Chinese government’s 2020 national security legislation that was imposed on Hong Kong.
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However, according to the publication, Hong Kong authorities have lately grown more rigorous in executing a colonial-era Crime Ordinance banning sedition.
According to the Associated Press, Hong Kong police are not releasing the identities of those detained. Ho had been recognized as one of the detainees by Hong Kong media, according to the news agency, and the singer had verified this on social media.
Christine Fang and Margaret Ng, two more former board members, are believed to have been detained, according to HKFP. The assets of Stand News were also blocked, according to the HKFP. According to the South China Morning Post and the Global Times, seven persons have been detained thus far.
Journalists in the area are concerned.
Police had interviewed the organization’s Deputy Assignment Director Ronson Chan on the same day as the raid on the Stand News headquarters and then released him, according to the report. Chan was also the head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, according to the broadcaster. According to the HKFP, the group is concerned “that the police have regularly detained prominent members of the media and searched the offices of news organizations carrying huge amounts of journalistic documents within a year.”
According to the HKFP, Stand News was founded in 2014 as a non-profit organization with a pro-democracy bent.
The HKFP reported that the news outlet was nominated for Reporters Without Borders’ 2021 Press Freedom Prize for Independence in November.
HKFP shared a brief video of police officers taking materials from the Stand News office on Twitter.
‘Tattered press freedom’ is a phrase used to describe the state of press freedom in the United
In a post on his organization’s website, cpj.org, Steven Butler of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the arrests “an open attack on Hong Kong’s already frayed journalistic freedom.”
“China is the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row,” according to the organization’s 2021 prison census.
Denise Ho discusses the human rights situation in Hong Kong and the role of the artist in political activity in a series of YouTube videos. Nathan Law and Joshua Wang, both pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong, have recently written books. Law, who is now exiled in the United Kingdom, published Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back earlier this month. Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now was published last year by Wang, who is now imprisoned in Hong Kong. Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist, wrote the foreword to Wang’s book.
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