Free Julian Assange! ✊

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Unlike most other inmates, who play football or exercise in groups, Lai walks alone in what appears to be a 5-by-10-meter (16-by-30-foot) enclosure surrounded by barbed wire under Hong Kong’s punishing summer sun before returning to his unairconditioned cell in the prison.

The publisher of the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, Lai disappeared from public view in December 2020 following his arrest under a security law imposed by Beijing to crush a massive pro-democracy movement that started in 2019 and brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

In a separate case, an appeals court is due to rule Monday on a challenge that Lai and six other activists have had filed against their conviction and sentencing on charges of organizing and taking part in an unauthorized assembly nearly four years ago.

He was scheduled to go on trial last December, but it was postponed to September while the Hong Kong government appealed to Beijing to block his attempt to hire a British defense lawyer.

“My father is in prison because he spoke truth to power for decades,” Lai’s son, Sebastien, said in a May statement to a U.S. government panel, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Lai, who suffers from diabetes and was diagnosed with high blood pressure in 2021 while in detention, is treated as a Category A prisoner, a status for inmates who have committed the most serious crimes such as murder.

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Dumb questions here. Why are they hiring a British lawyer and testifying in front of the US congress? Like i understand the actual why of that second one, but it's not like the house of representatives in the US has any actual power to save the guy that they would exercise. Like would a British lawyer have any more luck in getting him out than a Hong Kong lawyer? Are they worried no one will take the case?

Jimmy lai, pro democracy, smell like three letter agency.

Define democracy.

Back to your point about abuse, though,

... except you don't. Trial by jury is a decent system that decouples justice from political power. In this case, the politicians decided that was an inconvenience and did away with it.

What we should be worried about it is actual abuses, not potential abuses.

Agreed. This was an actual abuse.

What is the context behind this?