Hong Kong journalist wins in rare court ruling upholding media freedom

An award-winning Hong Kong journalist won an appeal quashing her conviction related to work on her investigative documentary Monday in a rare court ruling upholding media freedom in the territory.

Bao Choy was found guilty in April 2021 of deceiving the government by getting vehicle ownership records for journalistic purposes after she had declared in her online application that she would use the information for other traffic and transport related issues.

The investigative journalist was trying to track down perpetrators of a mob attack on protesters and commuters inside a train station during the massive anti-government protests in 2019 for her documentary.

Choy was fined 6,000 Hong Kong Dollars (USD 765) for two counts of making false statements at that time and called it a very dark day for all journalists in Hong Kong. That ruling also sparked outrage among local journalists over the city's shrinking press freedom.

On Monday, judges of the city's top court unanimously ruled in Choy's favour in a written judgment, quashing her conviction and setting aside the sentence.

The issues of falsity and knowledge were wrongly decided against the appellant because her journalistic investigation into the use of the vehicle on the dates in question did fall into the wide catchall category of other traffic and transport related matters'," the judgment read.

Even if it did not, it was not an irresistible inference that she knew that to be false," the judgment added.

The story Choy co-produced, titled 7.21 Who Owns the Truth, won the Chinese-language documentary award at the Human Rights Press Awards in 2021. The judging panel hailed it as an investigative reporting classic that had chased the smallest clues, interrogating the powerful without fear or favor.

In the crackdown on dissent that followed the 2019 protests, two vocal media outlets - Apple Daily and Stand News - have been forced to shut down and some of their top managers have been prosecuted.

Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai faces collusion charges under a sweeping national security law enacted in 2020. Two former Stand News editors were charged under a colonial-era sedition law that has been used increasingly to snuff out critical voices.

Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to China's rule in 1997, but critics say Beijing's promise that it would keep the city's freedoms is becoming increasingly threadbare.

Hong Kong ranked 140th out of 180 countries and territories in Reporters Without Borders' latest World Press Freedom Index released last month. The global media watchdog said the city has experienced an unprecedented setback since 2020, when the security law was introduced.