The leader of the Hong Kong journalists’ union was arrested on Wednesday, a police source said, just weeks before he was due to leave the city and start a fellowship abroad.
Ronson Chan, president of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), has been arrested for allegedly obstructing a police officer and committing disorder in a public place, a police source told AFP.
Channel C, the online news outlet Chan works for, said the veteran reporter was taken away by police officers who asked to verify his identity while he was covering a meeting of public housing owners.
Chan was due to leave Hong Kong at the end of September for the Reuters Institute’s six-month fellowship program at Oxford University.
Authorities have used a colonial-era national security law and sedition charges to crack down on dissidents in Hong Kong following pro-democracy protests three years ago.
Local media seen as critical of the government have faced a surge in police investigations and the city has plummeted in global press freedom rankings.
Like many now-defunct civil society groups and pro-democracy unions, both Chan and the HKJA have faced repeated criticism from media outlets reporting to Beijing’s liaison office in the city.
Such media coverage is often followed by police action.
Local tabloid Apple Daily and online news platform StandNews — for which Chan used to work — were forced to shut down last year after executives were charged with national security violations, leaving hundreds of journalists out of work.
When Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual press freedom rankings in May, Hong Kong had fallen 68 spots to rank 148 in the world.
In RSF’s first report in 2002, Hong Kong had some of the freest media in Asia and ranked 18th in the world.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong earlier this year presented Asia’s largest annual press awards for human rights, citing the risks of the security law – a decision that caused controversy among many journalists.
The club recently published a watered-down press freedom statement on its website.
One of the removed phrases from the statement read: “In the face of unprecedented attacks on the media, our club’s role has never been more important – nor has our commitment been stronger.”
