File photo pf Hong Kong police
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)A veteran Hong Kong journalist has been arrested by national security police for allegedly conspiring to publish “seditious materials”, local media have reported, in the latest crackdown on press freedom in the region.
Allan Au, 54, was said to have been arrested in a dawn raid on Monday.
The journalist and lecturer was a former columnist for Stand News, an online platform which was closed last December after authorities froze the company’s assets.
Although there has been no official police statement, multiple local sources reported the incident, while two other former employees of Stand News have previously been charged with sedition.
In 2017, the former Stanford University fellow wrote a book on censorship in Hong Kong. He had also spent a decade working for the government broadcaster, RTHK. He was axed last year amid a government-led shake up of the broadcaster.
Although sedition was introduced during British rule, it has become more widely used by the government in tandem with a controversial security law.
Under the security law, the government has powers to criminalise any act of subversion, secession, terrorism or collusion with foreign or external forces.
Within the 66 articles of the law, acts such as damaging public transport can be considered terrorism.
Last summer, Hong Kong’s last pro-democracy paper, Apple Daily, announced its closure following allegations that several reporters had breached the security law.
The publication had long been a critic of the Hong Kong and Chinese leadership while its founder, Jimmy Lai, was sentenced to 13 months in prison for participating in a vigil to mark the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
Last month Hong Kong police also threatened the leader of a UK-based human rights watchdog with jail.
Hong Kong Watch was accused of colluding with foreign forces and was ordered to take down its website, the organisation’s chief executive Benedict Rogers said in a statement.
Two British judges who sat on Hong Kong’s supreme court, Lord Robert Reed and Lord Patrick Hodge, left the country last month.
