Court punishes cardinal

A 90-year-old Catholic cardinal who criticised China’s crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong has been found guilty of raising funds to help the protest movement. Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, is the first religious leader to be prosecuted after the government in Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in an effort to suppress dissent. He and four other trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which is now defunct, were each fined HK$4000 (NZ$820) for failing to register the fund, which was set up in July 2019 and raised tens of millions of dollars in donations to pay protesters’ legal and medical fees.