On Monday, a Hong Kong court found Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai (黎智英) guilty of conspiring to publish seditious content and colluding with foreign forces under the national security law. Police arrested Lai multiple times in 2020 and has been in detention since December 2020. Lai is currently serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges.    

Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC, rejected those claims, calling the trial “political persecution” rather than a genuine legal process.

“The case against Jimmy Lai has been fabricated to try to make him seem as if he was behind the organizing force behind the 2019 unrest in Hong Kong,” de Pulford said. 

IPAC, a global network of lawmakers critical of Beijing’s human-rights record, was referenced hundreds of times in the judgment. De Pulford himself was mentioned more than 160 times, despite saying he barely knew Lai and had no substantive working relationship with him.

“It's just really bizarre to see text messages from me and some that I didn't even send, as if there was some terrible motivation to it,” he said. “All they were able to find, was that I sent him a press release. But I sent every other journalist in Hong Kong the same press release, including pro-establishment outlets.”

De Pulford said prosecutors attempted to link Lai to IPAC through Andy Li, a former volunteer who later became a prosecution witness, but failed to produce evidence supporting that narrative.

Looking beyond the case itself, de Pulford warned the verdict would further erode Hong Kong’s international standing.

“I think it's just important to say that we have to keep the flame of Jimmy Lai's case alive," he said. "Not just for him. But for all of the other political prisoners in Hong Kong."

He also criticized the U.K. government for failing to uphold its legal and moral obligations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which guaranteed Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy after the 1997 handover.