On Monday, Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and founder of the newspaper Apple Daily, was found guilty of false charges of sedition and collusion with foreign forces. He now faces a potential sentence of life in prison, after already spending more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement.
The Free Press is proud to publish a letter written by Natan Sharansky to his friend Lai. Sharansky can relate to what Lai is going through. He was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1977 on manufactured charges of treason. His real crime was trying to emigrate to Israel.
Below, Sharansky writes to Lai about how proud he is of him for standing up for the people of Hong Kong, and offers advice from lessons he learned in a Soviet prison. —Frannie Block
