#FreeJimmyLai : RSF calls on UK Prime Minister to meet son of detained publisher Jimmy Lai
The son of jailed British publisher Jimmy Lai has called for an urgent meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, as a Hong Kong court set 28 July as a tentative date for closing arguments in his father’s show trial. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) raises the alarm over these further delays in the trial, and calls on the UK to do all it can to secure Lai’s release and bring him home to London.
Jimmy Lai’s trial on absurd national security charges was originally slated to last 80 days, but has already dragged on for 145. After 52 days in the witness box, Jimmy Lai completed his testimony on Thursday, but now the Apple Daily publisher faces a wait of almost five months before the next stage.
“These further delays are a deliberate tactic to try to break Jimmy Lai and hope the world forgets him. The UK cannot sit by and watch as its citizen — a man who has fought his whole life for the values of democracy and freedom — slowly dies in jail. The Prime Minister has rightly said that securing Jimmy Lai’s release is a priority and he now needs to put actions to his words. We call on Keir Starmer to urgently meet Jimmy’s son Sebastien, and to do everything he can to bring Jimmy Lai home.
At a press briefing at RSF’s London office on 7 March, Sebastien Lai said he was deeply worried about his father, 77, whose health has declined significantly during his four years in solitary confinement. His legal team said it had been more than two years since they first requested a meeting with Starmer, then leader of the opposition. But despite numerous subsequent requests, that meeting has yet to happen.
“I am asking the Prime Minister to sit down and talk to me about my father before it’s too late,” Sebastien Lai told RSF. “As his time in the witness box showed, my father is still sharp and still fighting, which is incredible given the ordeal he has endured in solitary confinement. But his health is failing, and time is running out. Enough is enough, it’s time to bring my father home.”
In November, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Jimmy Lai is unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and called for his immediate release. He had already been sentenced to five years and nine months in prison on trumped-up fraud charges and served a 20-month sentence for his participation in “unauthorised” pro-democracy protests in 2019 and 2020.
Hong Kong has fallen dramatically in RSF's World Press Freedom Index, now ranked 135th out of 180 countries and territories surveyed, compared to 18th two decades prior. China, ranked 172nd, remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists, with at least 123 currently detained, including 11 in Hong Kong.
