A Hong Kong courtroom gave a 19-month jail time period to 5 speech therapists for his or her function within the publication of youngsters’s books deemed anti-government by prosecutors.

The 5 have been convicted final Wednesday beneath the colonial-era sedition legislation, in a case slammed by rights activists as a “brazen act of repression”.

Held in July 2021 for publishing three books that includes cartoons of sheep combating in opposition to wolves, defendants Lorie Lai, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Marco Fong pleaded not responsible.

Whereas handing down the sentence, district courtroom choose Kwok Wai Kin stated the therapists needed to be punished “not due to the publication or the phrases however due to their hurt or the chance of hurt to the minds of youngsters”, saying the works sowed seeds of “instability”.

“What the defendants have accomplished to the youngsters aged 4 and above was in truth a brain-washing train with a view to guiding the very younger kids to just accept their views and values,” the choose stated.

In one of many books, wolves wish to take over a village and eat the sheep, prompting the sheep to battle again in opposition to them.

They take motion like happening strike and escaping on boat, in an obvious reference to 12 democracy protesters fleeing Hong Kong by speedboat in 2020, earlier than being captured by the Chinese language coastguard.

That is the primary time a seditious publications case has gone to trial since pro-democracy protests started in 2019.

Acknowledging they might quickly go away jail, the choose requested the 5 after they “would depart the jail of your personal thoughts”.

Lai, nonetheless, identified that “freedom with limitations will not be freedom” earlier than being stopped by the choose who proclaimed courtroom to not be a “place to make political speech”.

“Everybody has the liberty of expression, however that doesn’t equal absolute freedom,” he stated as he interrupted Lai.

One other defendant, Yeung, stood unmoved on the trial, saying: “I don’t remorse my alternative, and I hope I can at all times stand on the aspect of the sheep.”

Further reporting from the wires