Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, July 11, 2020. LAUREL CHOR FOR LE MONDE
On Monday, February 9, pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai, who has already spent five years behind bars, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the heaviest sentence ever handed down in Hong Kong under the 2020 National Security Law. Lai and his eight co-defendants were found guilty of endangering national security on December 15, 2025. Lai was the only one to plead not guilty, sacrificing the one-third reduction in sentence that the other defendants received.
The editor-in-chief of the newspaper Apple Daily, Ryan Law Wai-kwong; the executive editor-in-chief, Lam Man-chung; and the editorial director, Fung Wai-kong, were each sentenced to 10 years in prison. The defendants who agreed to testify against Lai received sentence reductions of about eight years and will have to serve between six and eight years in prison.
Former Apple Daily employees present in the West Kowloon courthouse during this historic hearing, which concluded in less than 15 minutes, were stunned by the "atrociously harsh" sentences handed down to six other staff members from the group. "No one was expecting lenient sentences, but 10 years for people who only did their jobs as best as they could, and who, on top of that, pleaded guilty – it's unimaginable," one of them said, in tears.
