Mainland Chinese woman in trouble for taking photos in Hong Kong court not alone: other pictures are already online

The city’s courts are a strangely popular place for social media posts

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Tang Lin-ling is scheduled to return to court on June 15. Photo: Nora Tam

Published: 10:10pm, 25 May 2018Updated: 11:46pm, 25 May 2018

The recent case of a woman who apparently flouted the law by taking pictures in court during a trial is hardly an isolated incident, with other shots from inside court already online on tourists’ social media accounts.

On Friday Tang Lin-ling, a mainland Chinese woman who took photos during hearings related to 2014’s pro-democracy Occupy protests, was told by the judge to stump up a cash bail of HK$50,000 (US$6,400) and ordered not to leave the city, as police continued their investigation into her.

Tang is scheduled to return to court on June 15, when the Department of Justice is expected to reveal if she will be charged.

But she is not the only mainland visitor to have taken photos inside a Hong Kong court, a trawl of social media posts has revealed.

On popular platforms including Instagram and Sina Weibo there are at least 10 pictures from inside the High Court building, posted by visitors since 2014.

“Visited the High Court yesterday and ran into ‘Long Hair’,” mainland Weibo user “youngtiger1974” wrote last week, referring to former lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung. The user, who claimed in his online biography to have been a judge for 10 years on the Intermediate People’s Court in Henan and Guangdong provinces, uploaded the picture of Leung sitting in the High Court lobby, and another outside Court No 12.