The trial of 5 Hong Kong unionists who were arrested last year on sedition charges for writing a series of children's books about the 2019 pro-democracy protests began on Tuesday.
At the beginning of the five-day trial, The five members of Hong Kong General Union pleaded not guilty to publishing “seditious” material, The Guardian reports.
District court prosecutors argued that the books depicting Hong Kong residents as sheep and mainland Chinese wolves were written with “seditious intent.”
On the first day of the trial on Tuesday, prosecutor Laura Ng said the books characterized the two groups as hostile towards each other.
The prosecutor linked one of the publications, The 12 Warriors of Sheep Village, to the 2020 capture of 12 fugitives from Hong Kong by Chinese authorities.
She claimed that one of the books encouraged citizens of Hong Kong to arm themselves and confront authorities with force, while another advocated for outside meddling in the region's judicial system.
Ng alleged that a third book, which portrayed mainland Chinese as "selfish, uncivilized, and unhygienic," blamed them for the Covid outbreak and could trigger separatist tendencies among Hong Kong people.
“These are very simple story books but inside they have some information and some material inside which [has a] seditious intent, which brings hatred against the government and administration of justice and inciting violence to others,” Superintendent Steve Li Kwai-wah of the National Security Department told reporters following the group’s arrest last year.
Since their arrest by the national security police in July of last year, the unionists have been held without being granted bail.
The defendants, two men and three women in their 20s, were executive committee members of the General Union of Hong Kong.
At the time of the arrests, police reportedly seized more than 550 books and leaflets from the group and froze $20,391 in assets, The Guardian reports.
Together, the group face the charge of “conspiracy to print, publish, distribute, display and/or reproduce seditious publications” under the colonial-era crimes ordinance, with a maximum penalty of two years in jail if proven guilty.
