The Court of Appeal of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on Monday dismissed appeals by 12 people who were convicted of conspiracy to subvert State power because of their involvement in the “primary election” scheme in 2020.

The court also upheld the acquittal of barrister Lawrence Lau Wai-chung, who was also a defendant in the subversion case, dismissing an appeal made by the government against his discharge.

The 12 appellants and Lau were among the 47 people charged for their roles in the “primary election” scheme — which the authorities described as a plot to enable their political bloc to seize the legislative majority and then indiscriminately veto government budgets, with the aim of paralyzing the city’s administration and undermining the “one country, two systems” principle.

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All 47 defendants were arrested in 2021. Thirty-one of them — including legal scholar Benny Tai Yiu-ting — pleaded guilty ahead of trial, while the other 16 contested the charges in a 118-day trial in 2023. In May 2024, three judges of the Court of First Instance convicted 14 of them, acquitting Lau and former district councilor Lee Yue-shun.

The sentences handed down to those convicted — including those who had pleaded guilty — range from four years and two months to 10 years behind prison bars.

The 12 appellants are Wong Pik-wan, Lam Cheuk-ting, Raymond Chan Chi-chuen, Leung Kwok-hung, Clarisse Yeung Suet-ying, Kalvin Ho Kai-ming, Cheng Tat-hung, Ho Kwai-lam, Chow Ka-shing, Winnie Yu Wai-ming, Gordon Ng Ching-hang and Wong Ji-yuet.

READ MORE: Officials support trial verdict convicting 14 people of subversion

Handing down the ruling, the panel of judges, led by Jeremy Poon Shiu-chor, upheld that the “primary election” scheme — a scheme aimed at forcing out the city’s chief executive and bringing an end to the “one country, two systems” principle — breached Article 22 of the Hong Kong SAR National Security Law (NSL). The appellants’ actions, he said, were a clear abuse of power and amounted to grave interference in the city’s constitutional order.

Poon said that legislators must uphold Hong Kong’s constitutional order and that the NSL exists not only to stop threats to national security but to punish anyone who disrupts the constitutional order.

The court also said that in the appeal made against Lau by the Department of Justice the DOJ had failed to convince the court that the ruling made by the original court was unreasonable.