Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting me.
My name is Matthew Leung. I was a full-time news journalist in Hong Kong for six years. I left Hong Kong and moved to the U.K. this January due to safety concerns. I'm now a contract traffic warden working for city council.
Since the close of Apple Daily and the prosecution of those chiefs in the company, journalists in Hong Kong are under turbulence. I'm not the only one who gave up the career I loved and feel proud of, leaving Hong Kong and working a rather meaningless job in order to survive in a free country.
I'm sure you know what that turbulence means, but allow me to give you some summaries and numbers.
The Hong Kong government has been attacking the independent media for some time, but the heaviest blow was using the national security law to freeze the assets of news outlets. That's what happened to Apple Daily last June and then The Standard in December.
Arresting top executives of media outlets and seizing computers would obviously affect the work of journalists, but not as much as freezing assets.