The Facebook account of the Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, announced on Feb. 10 that Alex Chow and Lester Shum, two major figures from Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, would appear in Geneva on the 24th to speak at the summit.
Chow and Shum are, respectively, the Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, which played a central role in the Umbrella Movement, also known as Occupy Central, which saw the peaceful occupation of various parts of Hong Kong by pro-democracy demonstrators last autumn
The Geneva summit will also host exiled blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who escaped house arrest in mainland China, as well as activists and survivors of human rights abuses from other countries. These include the Ukrainian protest leader Mustafa Nayyem, the French journalist Pierre Torres who escaped from ISIS captivity, North Korean refugee Park Yeon-mi, a Nigerian schoolgirl who survived Boko Haram, as well as human rights and democracy activists from Russia, Syria, Iran, and other nations.
Another major student leader from the Umbrella Movement, the 18-year-old Joshua Wong, will be travelling to California to speak at a seminar to be held at UCLA, entitled “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in Regional Perspective.” Wong will be accompanied by Yu Au-loong, a Hong Kong activist, and Wu Jieh-min, a researcher at Academia Sinica, a Republic of China academic institution.
