Macau jails activist Au Kam San for 12 years and six months in first security case

Macau has sentenced Au Kam San, a 69-year-old former lawmaker and one of the city's best-known pro-democracy voices, to 12 years and six months behind bars. The verdict landed Friday after a closed-door trial, marking the first national security conviction in the territory's history. Au was found guilty of subversion against the political power of the state, among other offences.

The court convicted Au on four of the seven charges he faced, following a three-day trial that wrapped up in September, according to BBC News. A judge had ordered the proceedings held in secret to protect national security interests, and authorities never publicly disclosed the details of the case. Au was arrested in July 2025 and hit with three counts of subverting state power, three counts of endangering national security through contact with foreign organisations, and one count of breaching confidentiality.

Prosecutors painted Au as a long-running conduit for what they called external hostile organisations, accusing him of gathering, preparing and spreading information heavy with subversive political claims over a long period. His family has said he wasn't allowed to pick his own lawyer and was assigned one by the court instead.

Virginia Cheang, Au's wife, didn't soften her response. She condemned the ruling as a groundless persecution designed to humiliate her husband, and in an open letter Friday said she simply hopes authorities will let the family write to him and visit regularly. I dare not hope for more as I believe that will only lead to greater disappointment, she said.

Au spent two decades as one of the few pro-democracy lawmakers in a legislature stacked with pro-Beijing loyalists, taking his seat in September 2001 after years as a primary school teacher. He also co-organised Macau's annual vigils marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, gatherings that were once tolerated in Macau and Hong Kong but have effectively been shut down in both cities since 2020.

The sentence arrived a day after Hong Kong jailed Joshua Wong, the 30-year-old face of its now-collapsed democracy movement, for 10 years. Macau's national security law took effect in 2009, criminalising treason, secession and subversion, then widened in 2023 to cover non-violent secession and again this year to permit closed-door trials.