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Article snippet: HONG KONG — Three prominent young leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy movement were sentenced Thursday to six to eight months in prison, a severe setback for the semiautonomous Chinese city in its struggle for greater political freedom under Communist Party rule. Joshua Wong, the face of huge street demonstrations in 2014 for freer elections of Hong Kong’s leader, was sentenced to six months in prison. Two fellow protest leaders, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, were given eight and seven months, respectively. The sentences risked casting the three young men as Hong Kong’s first prisoners of conscience, undermining the city’s reputation as a haven of civil liberties with special status in China. Originally sentenced to community service and a suspended jail term, the three activists were given the immediate prison sentences by an appeals court after the Beijing-backed local government successfully pushed for harsher punishments. By law, the prison terms left them ineligible for public office for five years. “The government wanted to stop us from running in elections, and directly suppress our movement,” Mr. Wong said in an interview before the decision on Thursday afternoon. “There’s no longer rule of law in Hong Kong, it’s rule by law.” In a statement issued in the morning, the Hong Kong Department of Justice defended its appeal for tougher sentencing as its legal right, adding that the three protest leaders “were convicted not because they exercised their civil liberties... Link to the full article to read more