On 15 December 2025, supporters and other observers queued at West Kowloon court to hear the verdict in Jimmy Lai’s national-security case. The Guardian reported that some had waited overnight, filling the main courtroom and several overflow rooms. The trial had lasted more than two years, and the court convicted Lai of national-security and sedition offences.
A court queue differs from a line for goods or routine services. It orders access to the moment when the state applies law in public, inside rooms with strictly limited seats. The overnight wait did not itself settle the politics of the verdict; it measured how scarce first-hand access to an ostensibly public judgment had become.