Freedom of the Press

Intense US-Israeli bombardment sent flames and plumes of smoke into the night sky across Iran. Strikes hit Sanandaj near a media centre and across an expanse of the capital, Tehran.

Surprise ruling comes weeks after the media mogul was convicted and jailed for 20 years on national security charges.

A Hong Kong appellate court has overturned a fraud conviction against pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai in a surprise ruling weeks after his jailing for 20 years on a separate national security charge.

The ruling by the Court of First Instance on Thursday said that it allowed the appeal from Lai and ⁠another defendant in the case to proceed as a lower court judge had “erred”.

“[We] allow the appeals, quash the convictions and set aside the sentences,” the judges wrote.

The conviction that was overturned was from an earlier fraud case in which prosecutors alleged that a consultancy firm operated by Lai, 78, for his personal use had taken up office space that his now defunct media business – Apple Daily – rented for publication and printing purposes.

This was in breach of the terms of the lease Apple Daily signed with a government company and amounted to fraud, prosecutors said.

Lai had been sentenced to five years and nine months in prison in 2022 on the two fraud charges.

Former Apple Daily executive Wong Wai-keung was also charged in the same case and jailed for 21 months.

Judges at the Court of Appeal wrote in their judgement that while Apple Daily Printing had breached the lease terms by allowing the firm to use part of the space, it didn’t owe a duty to disclose its breach. They said even if it had owed and breached that duty, the same could not be attributed to Lai and Wong as a matter of law.

The trial judges’ “reasoning in concluding that the applicants were liable for the concealment as the prosecution contended is unsupportable”, they said.

Neither defendant appeared in court.

The ruling would slightly reduce Lai’s total prison time. The judges handling Lai’s national security case allowed the two sentences to be served concurrently for only two years, with the other 18 years to be added after the fraud sentence.

The lengthy sentence – over ‌two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one for publishing seditious materials – has raised concerns that he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Lai’s children have expressed hopes that a visit by United States President Donald Trump to Beijing could help secure the release of their father, a British citizen. The White House has confirmed that Trump will travel to China on March 31 through April 2 to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has said Lai was sentenced for exercising his right to freedom of expression and called on the Hong Kong authorities to release him on humanitarian grounds.

Chinese and Hong Kong authorities have defended Lai’s sentencing in the national security case, saying it reflected the spirit of the rule of law. They also insisted the security law is necessary for the city’s stability.

In a separate ruling on Thursday, a Hong Kong court sentenced the father of a wanted pro-democracy activist to eight months in prison under the city’s national security law for attempting to withdraw funds belonging to an “absconder”.

Kwok Yin-sang, 69, was found guilty on February 11 for “attempting to deal with, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources” after he tried to terminate his daughter Anna Kwok’s insurance policy and withdraw the funds.

He is the first person in the city to be charged and convicted of the offence.

He had pleaded not guilty and did not testify at the trial.

‘Illiberal’ PM, endorsed by ally Trump this week, to receive US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban says his country should fear the European Union more than Russia while promising to clear away the EU’s “oppressive machinery” before what looks will be heated parliamentary elections.

Delivering his annual state-of-the-nation speech on Saturday, Orban pledged to push out “the foreign influence that limits our sovereignty together with its agents” as the opposition Tisza Party maintains an 8 to 12 percentage point lead over Orban’s ruling Fidesz party eight weeks from the April 12 elections.

“Fear-mongering about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is primitive and unserious. Brussels, however, is a palpable reality and a source of imminent danger,” said the 62-year-old leader, who compared the EU to the repressive Soviet regime that dominated Hungary for decades last century.

Since returning to power for a second time in 2010, Orban has waged a campaign against “pseudo-civil organisations”, “bought journalists”, judges and politicians in his drive to build what he calls an “illiberal state”.

His crackdown on immigration has provided a blueprint for right-wing leaders, such as United States President Donald Trump.

‘War or peace’?

In Saturday’s speech, Orban signalled his work of clearing liberal forces from the country is only “half-done”, noting that Trump, who is backing him to win the upcoming vote, “rebelled against the liberals’ global-scale business, media and political network, thereby improving our chances as well”.

On Friday, Trump posted a new endorsement of Orban on his Truth Social platform, saying he’s a “truly strong and powerful leader with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results”.

The US president’s comments came as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio prepares to visit Hungary on Sunday. Rubio will fly in from the Munich Security Conference in Germany with a stopover in Slovakia for talks with nationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Orban, who has cultivated warm relations with Putin during his current stretch in power, this week cast the April elections as a stark choice between “war or peace”, warning in a Facebook post that Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party would drag the country into the conflict raging next door in Ukraine.

The prime minister has doubled down on his strategy of portraying Magyar as a “Brussels puppet” with billboards depicting him saying “yes” to a demand for “Money for Ukraine!” from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Jury chair Wim Wenders said filmmakers ‘have to stay out of politics’ when asked about German support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Indian author Arundhati Roy has announced that she is withdrawing from the Berlin International Film Festival after what she described as “unconscionable statements” by its jury members about Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Writing in India’s The Wire newspaper, Roy said she found recent remarks from members of the Berlinale jury, including its chair, acclaimed director Wim Wenders, that “art should not be political” to be “jaw-dropping”.

“It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time,” wrote Roy, the author of novels and nonfiction, including The God of Small Things.

“I am shocked and disgusted,” Roy wrote, adding that she believed “artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop” the war in Gaza.

“Let me say this clearly: what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel,” she wrote.

The war is “supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as several other countries in Europe, which makes them complicit in the crime,” she added.

During a panel to launch the festival on Thursday, a journalist asked the jury members for their views on the German government’s “support of the genocide in Gaza” and the “selective treatment of human rights” issues.

German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who is the chair of the festival’s seven-member jury, responded, saying that filmmakers “have to stay out of politics”.

“If we made movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight to politics. We are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people and not the work of politicians,” Wenders said.

Polish film producer Ewa Puszczynska, another jury member, said she thought it was “a bit unfair” to pose this question, saying that filmmakers “cannot be responsible” for whether governments support Israel or Palestine.

“There are many other wars where genocide is committed and we do not talk about that,” Puszczynska added.

Roy had been due to participate in the festival, which runs from February 12 to 22, after her 1989 film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, was selected to be screened in the Classics section.

Germany, which is one of the biggest exporters of weapons to Israel, after the US, has introduced harsh measures to prevent people from speaking out in solidarity with Palestinians.

In 2024, more than 500 international artists, filmmakers, writers and culture workers called on creatives to stop working with German-funded cultural institutions over what they described as “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine”.

“Cultural institutions are surveilling social media, petitions, open letters and public statements for expressions of solidarity with Palestine in order to weed out cultural workers who do not echo Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel,” organisers of the initiative said.

A court in Hong Kong has sentenced pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in jail following his conviction under a sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing.

A summary document by the court on Monday said 18 years of Lai’s sentence should be served consecutively to the existing five-year jail term in his fraud case.

The 78-year-old founder of the now defunct Apple Daily has already spent more than five years behind bars and was found guilty in December on two counts of foreign collusion and one count of seditious publication.

Given his age, the prison term could keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

Ahead of the sentencing, rights groups and Western governments called for Lai’s release, with some denouncing the case as “nothing but a charade”.

Lai’s family, lawyer, supporters and former colleagues have warned that he could die in prison as he suffers from health conditions, including heart palpitations and high blood pressure.

Before Lai left the courtroom, he looked serious, as some people in the public gallery cried.

In addition to Lai, six former senior Apple Daily staffers, an activist and a paralegal were also sentenced on Monday.

His co-defendants received jail terms between 6 years and 3 months and 10 years.

The convicted journalists are publisher Cheung Kim-hung, associate publisher Chan Pui-man, editor-in-chief Ryan Law, executive editor-in-chief Lam Man-chung, executive editor-in-chief responsible for English news Fung Wai-kong and editorial writer Yeung Ching-kee.

Ahead of the sentencing, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement that Lai’s trial “has been nothing but a charade from the start and shows total contempt for Hong Kong laws that are supposed to protect press freedom”.

Reporters Without Borders said the sentencing “will resonate far beyond Jimmy Lai himself, sending a decisive signal about the future of press freedom in the territory”.

Beijing has dismissed such criticism as attempts to smear Hong Kong’s judicial system, while Hong Kong authorities maintain that Lai’s case “has nothing to do with freedom of speech and of the press”.

Lai was one of the first prominent figures to be arrested under the security law, imposed in 2020. Within a year, some of Apple Daily’s senior journalists also were arrested. Police raids, prosecutions and a freeze of its assets forced the newspaper’s closure in June 2021.

The final edition sold a million copies.

Lai’s sentencing could heighten Beijing’s diplomatic tensions with foreign governments. His conviction has drawn criticism from the United Kingdom and the United States.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he had raised Lai’s case during his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last month, adding that the discussion was “respectful”.

Lai is a British citizen.

US President Donald Trump said he felt “so badly” after the verdict and noted he spoke to Xi about Lai and “asked to consider his release”.

Lai’s daughter, Claire, told The Associated Press news agency that she hopes authorities see the wisdom in releasing her father, a Roman Catholic. She said their faith rests in God. “We will never stop fighting until he is free,” she said.

Ahead of the sentencing, Hong Kong Free Press reported that police detained a woman outside the West Kowloon court after finding an Apple Daily keychain in her possession.

At least two other activists were also searched, including Tsang Kin-shing, a member of the now-disbanded League of Social Democrats.

The sentencing comes against the backdrop of heightened restrictions on the Hong Kong press.

The Hong Kong Journalists Association said in 2024 that dozens of journalists faced “systematic and organised” harassment and intimidation, including leaked personal information and death threats.

According to Reporters Without Borders, at least 900 Hong Kong journalists lost their jobs in the four years following the enactment of the national security law in the city.

US President Donald Trump lashed out at a journalist, calling her the ‘worst reporter’, after she questioned him about survivors of the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s name appears in the Epstein files. He has not been accused of any crimes by Epstein’s victims and has denied any wrongdoing.