Hong Kong: Cardinal Zen's conviction upheld on appeal

Hong Kong's Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected the appeal of Cardinal Joseph Zen and four other former trustees of the now-dissolved 612 Humanitarian Fund, upholding the conviction handed down in November 2022 by the West Kowloon Magistrates' Court. The five had been found guilty of failing to register the fund under the Societies Ordinance. Each was fined about four thousand Hong Kong dollars, less than five hundred euros.

The 612 Fund had been created in June 2019 to assist protesters arrested or injured during the movement against the proposed extradition law. Three appeal judges held that the fund was to be regarded as a society subject to registration, and not as a duly constituted trust: it was, they wrote, more than a mere sum of money held in trust by the applicants. Chief Judge Jeremy Poon found that the five had meant to use the fund as an instrument to raise and deploy public donations in support of the 2019 protests.

Cardinal Zen led the Diocese of Hong Kong from 2002 to 2009. In May 2022 the five had been briefly arrested on a charge of collusion with foreign forces, later dropped. The sixth person convicted, the fund's secretary, did not appeal. One of those convicted, the barrister Margaret Ng, announced that she would take the matter to the Court of Final Appeal, the territory's highest court, warning that if, each time a group of people comes together to accomplish something, it becomes an organisation that must ask the police for registration or an exemption, this would have a considerable impact on Hong Kong's civil society.

What the Church has always held

To relieve the prisoner is no optional devotion: it is a commandment, and one of those on which men will be judged at the last day. "I was in prison, and you came to me," says the Lord, and to those who neglected him: "as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me" (Matthew XXV, 36 and 45). The Catechism of the Council of Trent numbers the ransom and relief of captives among the corporal works of mercy, which every Christian is bound to perform according to his means.

This charity the Church holds from God, not from the leave of the prince. Leo XIII recalled it in his encyclical Immortale Dei: the Church is a society perfect in its own order, endowed with all the rights necessary to her end, and the civil power cannot subject her in the exercise of the mission she has received from on high.

The measure

We judge here neither the soul nor the office of a man, nor a point of local law, but an act set against the perennial rule. The point decided by the judges is administrative: a failure to register. But the work thus struck was the relief of prisoners and of the injured — that is, one of the works Christ commands and on which he will judge. To subject such a work to the licence of the State, and then to penalise its exercise, is to invert the order: charity toward the captive precedes human law and human measure; it does not await their permission.

Let the faithful retain the simple lesson: where the law of men crosses the work of mercy, the work remains due. We hold to the faith as the Church has always taught it, we pray for the persecuted and for those who judge them, and we draw from it neither schism nor fury, but constancy.

Sources. Gospel according to Saint Matthew, XXV, 34-45 (Vulgate / Douay-Rheims). Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the corporal works of mercy. Leo XIII, encyclical "Immortale Dei" (1 November 1885), on the Christian constitution of States and the liberty of the Church.