Hong Kong Jails Joshua Wong For 10 More Years In A Second Security Case

Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong activist who became the face of the city’s protest generation while still a teenager, was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in prison in a second national security case — a sentence that lands just weeks before he was due to finish the first one. The High Court convicted him on his guilty plea to conspiracy to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security, under the national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. Wong, who turned 30 last month, pleaded guilty in September.

The case covered a five-month period in 2020, between July and November, in which prosecutors said Wong conspired with the self-exiled activist Nathan Law and others to ask foreign countries and organisations to impose sanctions, blockades or other hostile measures against Hong Kong and China. The prosecution pointed to his social-media campaigning and to meetings with American politicians, among them the then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the then Senator Marco Rubio, now the US Secretary of State. Judge William Tam, who set a starting point of 13 years and reduced it for the guilty plea and mitigation, called the case “grave” and named Wong and Law as the conspiracy’s ringleaders. “Whilst it is a very heavy sentence on the defendant, the punishment must fit the gravity of the crime committed,” the judge said, adding that it was “also necessary for this court to express the community’s abhorrence” at Wong’s actions. The judge pointed to the real-world consequences the pair had sought: Washington’s revocation of Hong Kong’s preferential trade treatment and American sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials.

Wong is the only Hong Kong activist to have been prosecuted twice under the national security law. He was already serving four years and eight months for conspiracy to commit subversion in the “Hong Kong 47” case — the prosecution of the opposition camp’s unofficial 2020 primary election, the largest case brought under the law, in which 45 people were jailed and two acquitted. That sentence, handed down in November 2024, would have freed him in January 2027. The remainder of it will run alongside the new term, which is now expected to keep him in prison until late 2036. He has been behind bars continuously since late 2020 — more than 2,100 days. He was charged in the second case in June 2025, from inside prison. In a mitigation letter seen by CNN, Wong wrote that his activism “was never driven by hatred,” and that “none of my aspirations for the future is more important than my solemn wish to care for my ageing parents once I complete my sentence.”

The reactions split along the lines the case itself was fought on. Britain’s Foreign Office called the sentence “a clear example of how the National Security Law is being used to target individuals for political expression and participation,” called for an end to such prosecutions, and urged Beijing and Hong Kong to honour the rights guaranteed under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 — the treaty under which Britain handed Hong Kong back in 1997. The US consulate in Hong Kong said Washington “strongly condemns” the sentence and called for Wong’s immediate release, saying he “has been unjustly imprisoned since December 2020, demonstrating that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate for fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong.” China’s foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said Wong had pleaded guilty “in the face of overwhelming facts and evidence” and that Beijing supports Hong Kong in upholding national security. Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee, said Wong and Law had committed “extremely serious offences, which not only severely undermined national sovereignty, security, and development interests, but also directly prejudiced the well-being of the general public and the stability of society.” Amnesty International’s Sarah Brooks called the sentence “another grim reminder of how Hong Kong’s National Security Law has become a tool to punish dissent rather than to genuinely protect national security,” noting that it arrived, in her words cruelly and perhaps deliberately, mere months before Wong would have been eligible for release. Outside the court, dozens of supporters had camped for up to two nights to be present; police security was heightened. Whether Wong will appeal was not known on Thursday. The heaviest sentence yet imposed under the law remains the 20 years given to the newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai.

Sources: Associated Press, CNN and The Times, court reporting, November 5, 2026; statements of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the US Consulate General in Hong Kong, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amnesty International and Hong Kong Watch.