Is either defendant sentenced to five years or more by 30 October 2026?
BinaryResolves 30 Oct 2026
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Your forecast
Yes
No
Resolved
Resolved: YES
On 11 September 2026 the High Court in Hong Kong sentenced Lee Cheuk-yan to seven years and Chow Hang-tung to seven years and three months in prison, as reported by BBC News and The Guardian.
Resolved 11 Sep 2026
How this resolves
The market resolves on the Hong Kong Judiciary's sentencing decision; YES if either Lee Cheuk-yan or Chow Hang-tung receives a custodial sentence of five years or longer, as reported by at least two of BBC News, Reuters and The Guardian, by 23:59 GMT on 30 October 2026. It resolves NO if no sentence has been passed by then.
The pattern behind it
3 of 4
Three of the last four national security convictions were followed by a sentence inside a fortnight: Tong Ying-kit in three days in 2021, and each of Chow Hang-tung's two vigil convictions within days. The exception is the case most like this one in scale, the 47 democrats, where sentencing came six months after the May 2024 verdict. The window and the full record are the same four cases, because the law has produced few contested headline trials. The size of this trial, three defendants, a guilty plea among them and separate mitigation, pulls towards the exception rather than the majority.
We looked at every major conviction under Hong Kong's national security law since 2021 where the sentence did not come straight away, as in this case. We asked one question: was the sentence passed within 14 days of the verdict? Four cases fit, and we show all four. In three of them it was.
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