Unlike most other inmates, who play football or exercise in groups, Lai walks alone in what appears to be a 5-by-10-meter (16-by-30-foot) enclosure surrounded by barbed wire under Hong Kong’s punishing summer sun before returning to his unairconditioned cell in the prison.

The publisher of the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, Lai disappeared from public view in December 2020 following his arrest under a security law imposed by Beijing to crush a massive pro-democracy movement that started in 2019 and brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

In a separate case, an appeals court is due to rule Monday on a challenge that Lai and six other activists have had filed against their conviction and sentencing on charges of organizing and taking part in an unauthorized assembly nearly four years ago.

He was scheduled to go on trial last December, but it was postponed to September while the Hong Kong government appealed to Beijing to block his attempt to hire a British defense lawyer.

“My father is in prison because he spoke truth to power for decades,” Lai’s son, Sebastien, said in a May statement to a U.S. government panel, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Lai, who suffers from diabetes and was diagnosed with high blood pressure in 2021 while in detention, is treated as a Category A prisoner, a status for inmates who have committed the most serious crimes such as murder.

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