London, England, Mar 14, 2022 / 09:57 am
A Catholic activist insisted on Monday that his U.K.-based human rights monitoring group would not be silenced after Hong Kong police threatened him with three years in jail.
Benedict Rogers spoke out on March 14 after receiving a formal warning from the Hong Kong Police Force’s National Security Department regarding Hong Kong Watch, an NGO he founded in 2017 to track human rights, freedoms, and rule of law in the former British colony.
The police said that Hong Kong Watch could incur a fine of HK$100,000 (around $12,800) or its chief executive face three years in jail under the National Security Law that came into force in July 2020. They also demanded that the charity shut down its website.
“We will not be silenced by an authoritarian security apparatus which, through a mixture of senseless brutality and ineptitude, has triggered rapid mass migration out of the city and shut down civil society,” said Rogers, who converted to Catholicism in 2013 and lives in the U.K.