Editorial: When the Law Punishes Conscience — Why Justice Can Stand Above Unjust Law

The prison terms handed to Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho are about Hong Kong, June Fourth and the National Security Law. But they also raise an older and more difficult question: what happens when law and justice separate?

A legal system deserves respect not because every rule written by a government is automatically just, but because law is supposed to restrain power, protect the weak, establish predictable rights and place rulers under rules they cannot rewrite at will. When political authority can define peaceful remembrance, democratic advocacy or historical truth as crimes against the state, legality alone is no longer enough to settle the moral question.

In Chinese political and moral language, one way to express that distinction is 义大于法: justice, conscience and moral obligation can stand above an unjust law.

Three sentences, three forms of courage

According to Reuters and Associated Press, Chow was sentenced to 7 years and 3 months, Lee to 7 years, and Ho to 5 years and 2 months after the court found their leadership and advocacy through the Hong Kong Alliance amounted to inciting subversion. The Alliance had organized Hong Kong’s annual June Fourth candlelight vigils for decades.

Each of the three represents something different. Chow represents conscience: the refusal to let criminal punishment redefine one’s deepest convictions. Lee represents memory: the persistence required to keep June Fourth in public life when powerful institutions prefer silence. Albert Ho represents law itself under pressure: a lawyer and longtime public figure confronting a system in which the legal framework increasingly operates inside political limits set by the state.

That is why these sentences cannot be understood only as numbers of years. They concern the boundary between law and obedience.

When a party stands above law

The problem is familiar to Chinese rights lawyers. The lawyers targeted in and after the 709 crackdown repeatedly tried to do something very ordinary in principle: use statutes, procedure, evidence and the courts to protect defendants. Their work illustrated a structural contradiction. A lawyer can invoke every provision available, but if the ruling party ultimately decides which speech is dangerous, which defendant is politically unacceptable and which outcome is permitted, then law ceases to be an independent shield.

The forms are still there: statutes, indictments, judges, hearings and judgments. What is weakened is the idea that law can bind political power from the outside.

That distinction matters because authoritarian systems also use laws. The existence of a statute does not answer whether the statute is just, whether its application is proportionate, or whether citizens retain rights the state may not extinguish.

Conscience is not the enemy of law

To say that justice can stand above unjust law is not to celebrate lawlessness. It is the opposite. A durable constitutional order depends on a deeper moral foundation: human dignity, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, truthfulness in public institutions and limits on government power.

When those foundations disappear, legality can become a vocabulary for coercion.

Chow’s position, as reported after sentencing, captures this conflict with unusual clarity: she has maintained her democratic convictions even when the law defines them as criminal. Her choice does not mean that conscience can excuse every act. It means that peaceful belief and remembrance cannot be transformed into moral wrongdoing simply because political authority has attached a criminal label to them.

June Fourth is why this matters so much

Hong Kong’s June Fourth vigils carried meaning far beyond one annual gathering. They preserved a public historical memory unavailable in mainland China. For decades, tens of thousands could gather with candles and remember people killed in Beijing in 1989. The vigil represented an unwritten promise that some truths could still be spoken publicly in Hong Kong.

That space has now contracted dramatically. The sentencing of former Alliance leaders therefore does more than punish three individuals. It tells an entire society that remembrance itself can carry criminal risk when remembrance leads to political judgment.

Our longer background coverage of Chow’s case is here: Five Years After Chow Hang-tung’s Arrest, Her Case Remains a Test of Hong Kong’s Freedom to Remember June Fourth.

“Freedom is not free”

The phrase engraved at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington — “Freedom is not free” — is often repeated because it states something democracies sometimes forget. Rights survive because people are willing to bear costs for them.

Political prisoners make that cost visible. They lose years with their families, professional lives, health, privacy and freedom because they refuse to pretend that what they believe is false.

That sacrifice should not be romanticized. Prison is not an abstraction. But neither should it be stripped of meaning. The courage of people such as Chow, Lee and Ho shows that political power does not gain moral authority merely because it can impose punishment.

A Free China must put law under justice

The future China we advocate should not replace one arbitrary power with another. It should build institutions in which law serves justice precisely because no party, leader or movement is above it.

That requires independent courts, enforceable constitutional rights, open historical archives, freedom of expression and association, and peaceful transfer of political power. It requires legal rules that protect opponents as well as supporters.

In an earlier Free China Movement statement, co-founder Lian Shengde put the principle this way:

“China’s future must not be built on fear or revenge. It must be built on truth, constitutional government, equal rights, and the peaceful transfer of political power.”

That full statement is available here: Peacefully Seeking Democracy Is Not Subversion. Remembering June Fourth Is Not a Crime.

The point of 义大于法 is therefore not that law should be discarded. It is that law must answer to justice if it is to deserve obedience. A government can imprison people who remember June Fourth. It can label democratic advocacy subversion. It can sentence conscience. But it cannot, by those acts alone, make injustice just.

Editorial position of the Free China Movement.