On 4 June, hundreds of people stood in the rain outside the Chinese embassy in London to remember the Tiananmen Square massacre thirty-two years ago. Among them was Nathan Law, masked but still recognisable as one of the faces of Hong Kong’s protest movement. Although the crowd was small compared to the candlelight vigils Law had been accustomed to in Hong Kong, this was one of the biggest ever commemorations of the event in the British capital.

On the same day last year, Law was one of tens of thousands who assembled in Victoria Park for the traditional Tiananmen vigil, in defiance of the authorities’ banning of the event on pandemic health grounds. Afterwards, police charged prominent activists, including Law and his friend and colleague Joshua Wong, for participating in an unauthorised assembly and ‘inciting others to participate in an illegal assembly’. Law didn’t wait for his trial; by the end of that month, he had fled to the United Kingdom.

• Tags: Hong Kong, Issue 24, Koey Lee, Nathan Law