Jimmy Lai, the detained pro-democracy activist and media mogul who is the target of Hong Kong’s most high-profile national security case, took the stand in court on Wednesday. For the first time since he was detained in December 2020, Lai spoke publicly about the charges against him, for which he faces spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Four years after his arrest, the 77-year-old seemed older and not as strong as he used to be. His first words – swearing an oath on the Bible – were delivered hoarsely.

Lai, a British citizen, is charged with one count of conspiracy to publish seditious publications and two counts of conspiracy to foreign collusion, under the city’s national security law (NSL), which was introduced in 2020 and has been widely condemned as a tool to crush freedoms. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Here are the key points from his testimony:

Lai wanted to stop the national security law

Lai had been very opposed to the national security law that is now being used against him. He said that Apple Daily, his once hugely popular, but now shuttered, pro-democracy newspaper, “would be finished” if the law came into effect. The newspaper closed in 2021.

He had wanted Donald Trump, the then president of the US, to stop the law. “I was hoping that [Trump] would stop the NSL, maybe by asking China not to do it … a call to China, a call to Xi Jinping, whatever,” he said.

Lai had urged the Taiwanese edition of Apple Daily to not “go against” the US president “because the time had become critical that we wanted President Trump to stop the NSL”.

But he said he had never met, spoken to, or exchanged messages with Trump personally.

Lai is friends with former Taiwanese president

Lai said that he had known the former president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, since before her time in office, and considered her a friend. He said that they had met several times. “I think her interest in meeting me is of course because of my media … She’d ask me sometimes about the general opinion of the people.”

He had also introduced her to US defence officials because her aide had told him she wanted to know what the Trump administration was thinking internally about Taiwan.

Asked why he wanted to help Taiwan, Lai said: “Taiwan is the only democracy of Chinese people, for the whole history of Chinese people.”

Lai met foreign officials, but didn’t make any requests of them

Lai testified that in July 2019, shortly after the start of the mass pro-democracy protests, he met the then US vice-president, Mike Pence, and the then US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. He said that he didn’t request anything of either of them other than support.

Lai said: “I would not dare to ask the vice-president to do anything, I just relayed to him what happened in Hong Kong when he asked me. I asked him to voice up for Hong Kong and support us, but there was never anything particularly that I asked for.”

He also confirmed his having met Nancy Pelosi, who at the time was the US House speaker, but he said that he did not speak in that meeting, only listened. He denied ever trying to appeal to foreign officials to influence government policy in China.

Eric Lai (no relation), a research fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said Jimmy Lai’s evidence showed “that the charge of colluding with foreign forces under the NSL was so broad and unreasonable that [it] criminalises ordinary exchange and communications activities with [people] overseas”.

He has not called for Hong’s Kong independence

Apple Daily represented “Hong Kong values” of the rule of law, democracy, and political and social freedoms, Lai said.

But he said that neither he – or the paper – ever went as far as calling for Hong Kong’s independence. Such ideas were “a reality too crazy to think about” and discussion of it was banned in Apple Daily.

“I always thought the advocacy of independence for Hong Kong was a conspiracy, because people just wanted us to advocate just to get us into a trap,” he said.

But the newspaper’s readers were not easily impressionable, Lai insisted.

“The more information you have, the more you are in the know and the more you are free,” he said.