On 17 August 2017, Yeung and two other judges of the Court of Appeal, Derek Pang and Jeremy Poon, sentenced the three main leaders in the 2014 Hong Kong protests, Joshua Wong, Alex Chow, and Nathan Law, to six to eight months in prison in the case of ; the trio had stormed a fenced-off government forecourt known as "Civic Square" which triggered the 79-day Occupy protests. The ruling sparked widespread fear over Hong Kong's judicial independence, as the Court of Appeal overturned the more lenient sentence of the Court of First Instance after the government pushed for harsher punishments.