Gov’t loses appeal against acquittal of former lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting over 2019 protest charge

Hong Kong’s Department of Justice (DoJ) has lost its appeal against a lower court’s decision to acquit former lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting of a perverting the course of justice charge linked to the 2019 protests and unrest.

A panel of three Court of Appeal judges delivered the judgment on Friday, upholding a previous ruling that found Lam and two co-defendants not guilty.

The case relates to a confrontation after a protest at Tuen Mun Park on July 6, 2019, about a month after large-scale demonstrations began.

Lam and two others were accused by the prosecution of pressuring a man, known to the court as X, to delete images on his phone.

Protesters suspected that X had taken close-up photos of protesters at a July 1, 2019 protest outside the police headquarters in Wan Chai.

Lam was charged with perverting the course of justice, while a co-defendant, social worker Aggie Chung, was charged with criminal damage and accessing a computer with dishonest intent.

A third co-defendant, journalist Ronnie Tsang, was also charged with perverting the course of justice as well as participating in an unlawful assembly.

Besides Tsang’s unlawful assembly charge, a District Court judge acquitted the defendants of all the offences in January 2023.

The judge, Douglas Yau, said in 2023 that Lam was acting as a peacemaker to defuse a tense situation, and that he was only trying to get X out of danger when he asked him to let protesters check his phone after being surrounded.

Handing down the judgment on Friday, Court of Appeal judges Derek Pang, Keith Yeung, and Judianna Barnes sided with the District Court judge.

The judges said that while the deletion of pictures would be an obstruction of police investigations and legal procedures, there was no way to confirm whether those pictures actually existed in the first place.

Lam, a former member of the now-defunct Democratic Party, is currently serving time after being found guilty in the Hong Kong 47 proceedings, the city’s largest national security case.

He and dozens of other activists were convicted in May 2024. Lam, who had pleaded not guilty, was sentenced to six years and nine months in prison.

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Hillary Leung is a journalist at Hong Kong Free Press, where she reports on local politics and social issues, and assists with editing. Since joining in late 2021, she has covered the Covid-19 pandemic, political court cases including the 47 democrats national security trial, and challenges faced by minority communities.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Hillary completed her undergraduate degree in journalism and sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She worked at TIME Magazine in 2019, where she wrote about Asia and overnight US news before turning her focus to the protests that began that summer. At Coconuts Hong Kong, she covered general news and wrote features, including about a Black Lives Matter march that drew controversy amid the local pro-democracy movement and two sisters who were born to a domestic worker and lived undocumented for 30 years in Hong Kong.