HONG KONG—Hong Kong police on Tuesday arrested a veteran pro-democracy politician who was granted bail last August for medical treatment after spending more than a year in detention on a subversion charge.
Albert Ho, 71, once led the city’s largest opposition group, the Democratic Party, and is a lawyer who runs his own law firm.
Police handcuffed Ho and took him away from his home in a vehicle, a Reuters witness said.
Ho’s law firm could not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ho has been charged with inciting subversion under a draconian national security law that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed on the former British colony in 2020. He has pleaded not guilty.
He was granted bail last August, with media reporting at the time that he needed medical treatment for lung cancer.
Earlier this month, police arrested a veteran union leader, Elizabeth Tang, after she visited her pro-democracy activist husband in a high security prison. She was charged with collusion with foreign forces and granted bail.
Ho’s brother, Frederick Ho, was also arrested in connection with that case.
Albert Ho is accused with two others, Lee Cheuk-yan, 66, and Chow Hang-tung, 38, of inciting subversion of state power under the national security law, given their leadership roles in a now disbanded group called the “Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.”
The CCP imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 clamping down on dissent after the city was rocked by anti-CCP, pro-democracy protests a year earlier.
The national security law, which punishes acts including so-called subversion and collusion with foreign forces has been criticized by Western governments as a tool to crush dissent.
The Asian financial hub returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” formula granting it a high degree of autonomy but some Western countries say the CCP is undermining those freedoms with the 2020 national security law.
