“Everyone saw what was coming,” Tom Grundy, editor-in-chief and founder of Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP)—the last major independent daily still holding out in the city—told the ARA. Grundy is referring to the sentencing of Jimmy Lai, the media mogul and founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, who was sentenced this Monday to twenty years in prison for violating the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020.

Catalan political prisoners have also reached the White House, at least as far as the report on the situation of human rights in the world that the US State Department published this Tuesday. Without taking a position at any time, the US administration collects all the times that supranational organisations have condemned the situation of political prisoners and have called for their freedom. Specifically, the White House dedicates a section of the report specifically to "political prisoners and detainees", where it recalls that the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for the release of "seven of the nine pro-independence Catalan prisoners" for their role in "the referendum" of October 1, 2017. These events date back to July 2019, when the group called the pre-trial detention of Oriol Junqueras, Quim Forn, Raül Romeva, Josep Rull, Dolors Bassa, Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart "arbitrary" and called for their "immediate release". Then there was still no sentence and all were in custody (Carme Forcadell and Jordi Turull did not ask for a position on their situation).