Kwok Yin-sang, 69, is the father of Anna Kwok, an overseas pro-democracy advocate who had a HK$1 million ($128,000) bounty placed on her by the city's authorities in 2023.

Hong Kong later made it a crime under its homegrown national security law, passed in 2024, for anyone to deal with the funds or other financial assets of fugitives.

The elder Kwok became the first person to be convicted of this offence this month in a case rights groups called an "alarming act of collective punishment".

Acting Principal Magistrate Cheng Lim-chi said on Thursday Kwok Yin-sang did not directly engage in acts endangering national security, but that the nature of his actions was still serious.

Cheng denied his conviction amounted to the collective punishment of wanted activists' families, or that Kwok Yin-sang had been targeted because he was a relative.

Kwok Yin-sang was found guilty after he attempted in 2025 to withdraw a balance of around US$11,000 by terminating an insurance policy he bought for his daughter when she was an infant.

At the time, Anna Kwok said that authorities were retaliating against her activism and called the conviction "hostage taking", adding that the charges were founded on an "incoherent fiction".

Hong Kong's once-vibrant political opposition and civil society have been all but quashed since Beijing imposed a national security law on the city in 2020, a year after huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests.

The city later imposed its own additional law in 2024.

Hong Kong authorities have vowed to pursue overseas activists accused of endangering national security and have issued bounties on 34 people so far, an action decried by critics as transnational repression.

A total of 386 people had been arrested for various national security crimes as of the start of this month, with 176 of them being convicted.