Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai-tak said the defendant had contributed materially to the dissemination of the political group’s radical and ill-conceived objectives by filming two promotional videos and encouraging a friend to vote in the election.

“The entities concerned were established as foreign bases, with the purpose of propagating hostile sentiments and opposition to the People’s Republic of China on a global scale,” he said.

“The entire operation was designed to disseminate distorted portrayals of Chinese sovereignty and of [Hong Kong] within the international community, to malign the Chinese authority and to mislead foreign states and their citizens into accepting extremist ideology.”