Communist China has sentenced newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. A longtime resident of Hong Kong and British citizen, Lai was convicted of sedition and collusion with foreign powers. As his son Sebastien Lai notes, this is a de facto death sentence for the ailing 78-year-old.

The Chinese Communist Party’s apparatchiks are celebrating with typically hyperbolic rhetoric. Describing Lai as “evil,” Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu screeched that he “for sure deserves his punishment after all the harm he has done.” The CCP office in Hong Kong said the sentence was the city’s “best Lunar New Year gift.” The Chinese foreign ministry praised the sentence, falsely claiming it is a purely internal matter. In fact, it is in patent breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration — a binding treaty under which Beijing committed to uphold Hong........

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