HRIC Statement on the guilty verdict to Chow, Lee and Ho Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Convictions Criminalize Memory and the Demand for Democracy Human Rights in China (HRIC) condemns the conviction of Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人) and Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, on charges of “inciting subversion” under Hong Kong’s National Security Law. We also condemn the prosecution of their co-defendant, veteran democracy advocate Albert Ho (何俊仁), who earlier pleaded guilty to the same charge. For three decades, the Hong Kong Alliance organized the annual June Fourth candlelight vigil in Victoria Park, where tens of thousands of Hong Kong people peacefully gathered to mourn those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, demand accountability, and keep alive the hope for a democratic China. Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung, Albert Ho, and their colleagues acted with courage and principle in preserving the memory of June Fourth Remembering historical truth is not subversion. Calling for democracy and an end to one-party rule is not a crime. The significance of today’s verdict extends far beyond these defendants. The prosecution has transformed the peaceful remembrance of one of the darkest chapters in modern Chinese history—and the democratic aspirations associated with that remembrance—into evidence of a crime against the state. For decades, Victoria Park represented something unique in China: a place on Chinese soil where people could publicly mourn the victims of June Fourth and openly demand accountability. For the Tiananmen Mothers and other victims and families inside mainland China, who have endured decades of surveillance, intimidation, and enforced silence, the sea of candles in Hong Kong offered comfort and solidarity. It told them: you have not been forgotten. The destruction of that space is one of the clearest measures of what has happened to Hong Kong. But Beijing has failed in its larger objective. It has closed Victoria Park to commemorations of Tiananmen Massacre, dismantled the Hong Kong Alliance, imprisoned its leaders, and attempted to erase June 4th from Hong Kong’s public life. Yet the commemoration has not disappeared. It has become global. Hong Kong people have carried the candles of Victoria Park with them around the world. This year, June Fourth Tiananmen Massacre was commemorated in dozens of cities internationally, while online remembrance and the circulation of historical records, photographs, videos, and eyewitness testimony continue to expand. The Chinese government’s determination to suppress June Fourth commemoration reflects precisely why its memory remains so powerful. Tiananmen is not simply an argument about China’s past. It raises fundamental questions about China’s future: whether Chinese people have the right to know their own history, to hold their government accountable, to speak freely, and ultimately to choose how they are governed. Those questions remain unanswered 37 years later. HRIC calls for the convictions against Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung to be overturned, for Albert Ho not to be punished for his peaceful political advocacy, and for all three to be released from imprisonment arising from the peaceful exercise of their fundamental rights. No court verdict can erase what happened in Beijing in 1989. No National Security Law can make mourning a moral wrong. And no government can permanently extinguish a historical memory carried by people across generations and now across the world. The candles may have been driven from Victoria Park, but they have multiplied far beyond Hong Kong.