Chow, who was jailed in 2020, said in her statement that she made her decision “consi-dering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health.”
“Perhaps I will never go back again in my lifetime,” she said.
In 2021, Chow was released from prison in Hong Kong after serving more than 6 months for attending an “unlawful” assem-bly in 2019.
She was convicted of attend-ing public protests against a law that would have allowed for political prisoners to be extradited to mainland China to face trial in some circumstances. She was charged and sentenced along with Joshua Wong, a Christian and co-founder of the Demosisto pro-democracy organization with Chow.
Chow was separately facing charges of “colluding with for-eign forces” and other offenses under Hong Kong’s controversial National Security Law.
Before her imprisonment, Chow was banned from running in Hong Kong elections following election law reforms. She has been accused of “sedition” under the terms of the National Security Law, imposed on Hong Kong by the mainland government on July 1, 2020.
The law effectively crimi-nalizes many forms of political speech or criticism of the govern-ment; Chow, Wong, and Nathan Law, another pro-democracy activist currently seeking political refuge in the U.K., were forced to dissolve Demosisto within days of it being imposed.
Following her release from prison, Chow stepped back from public speaking, noting at the time that she needed to recover physically from her time in prison, noting that “[my] body has become too thin during this period.”
Earlier this year, Chow was offered the return of her passport and the possibility of international travel if she first undertook a well-photographed trip to main-land China where several police officers took her on a tour of an exhibition of Chinese national achievements and a visit to the headquarters of the technology company Tencent.
Chow wrote statement Sun-day that “I don’t want to be forced to do anything any more, and I don’t want to be forced to go to mainland China any more.”