Seventeen Years After the Law, Macao’s First National Security Verdict

Macao passed its national security law in 2009. For sixteen years nobody was publicly known to have been prosecuted under it. On Friday, November 6, that changed with a single verdict: the Court of First Instance sentenced former legislator Au Kam-san, 69, to 12 years and six months in prison.

Au is not an obscure figure. A teacher by profession and Macao-born, he sat in the Legislative Assembly as a directly elected member for twenty years, five consecutive terms from 2001 to 2021, and was one of the most recognisable democracy campaigners in the former Portuguese territory. He chose not to stand again in 2021. Police arrested him in July 2025.

What the court found

The trial took place behind closed doors on September 16 and 18; the court said this was necessary to avoid prejudice to national security, and Au was represented by a court-appointed lawyer. The judgment itself was read out in public. Au was convicted of one count of subverting state power, two counts of establishing ties with organisations or individuals outside Macao to commit acts against national security, and one count of breach of secrecy. He was acquitted of two further subversion counts for insufficient evidence.

According to the court, Au spent years helping what it called hostile overseas organisations collect and spread political material aimed at subverting state power, including information it described as false or distorted. The secrecy charge relates to his time as a lawmaker: the court said he passed on content from a closed-door committee meeting in 2021 to an overseas organisation. It also said he had not disputed most of the basic facts, but judged the intent “extremely high”. The available range for the combined sentence ran from 11 years and three months to 19 years and six months.

Two cities, one week

The timing invites comparison. A day earlier, a Hong Kong court jailed activist Joshua Wong for ten years under that city’s own national security law, a sentence condemned by the United States, Japan and eight other countries. Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, for its part, said of Au’s case that national security is a red line that must not be crossed and that the judgment upheld the rule of law.

For Macao, a city better known abroad for casinos than courtrooms, the larger significance may be precedent. A law that sat largely untested for most of its life — it was amended in 2023 — now has a first conviction, a first sentence and a first set of judicial reasoning that future cases will be measured against.