Jimmy Lai built Apple Daily into Hong Kong's loudest pro-democracy voice, then spent five years in solitary confinement waiting for a trial that ended, in February 2026, with the harshest sentence any journalist has received under the city's national security law.
Jimmy Lai has now spent more of the past six years inside Hong Kong's Stanley Prison than outside it, most of that time in solitary confinement, waiting first for a trial and then for its verdict. He founded Apple Daily in 1995 and built it, along with the wider Next Digital media group, into the most prominent pro-democracy voice in the territory's press for a quarter century. Police raided its newsroom and arrested him on August 10, 2020, months after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 protest movement. He has been in continuous custody since December 2020, when a court revoked his bail.
The case that finally reached a verdict on December 15, 2025 accused Lai of conspiring to collude with foreign forces, drawing on national security law provisions carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, alongside a separate charge of conspiring to publish seditious material under the territory's older Crimes Ordinance. A panel of three judges, hand-picked by the Hong Kong government rather than selected by the ordinary judicial rotation, and sitting without a jury, found him guilty on all three counts, describing him in its judgment as the mastermind of the alleged conspiracies.
Prosecutors built much of their case around thirty three opinion columns Lai had written and a series of posts on social media calling for foreign sanctions against Hong Kong and mainland officials during the 2019 unrest. Lai testified in his own defense over November and December 2024, telling the court he might have asked American officials to consider sanctions on Beijing and Hong Kong; closing arguments, originally expected far earlier, were repeatedly delayed and finally scheduled for August 2025, partly on account of Lai's declining health. Human Rights Watch's Elaine Pearson described the entire proceeding as a case in which Lai had faced "multiple serious violations of fair trial rights, including being tried by judges hand-picked by the Hong Kong government, denied a jury trial, subjected to prolonged pretrial detention, and barred from having counsel of his choice." The Committee to Protect Journalists called the conviction "a disgraceful act of persecution."
Sentencing took place on February 9, 2026. Lai received twenty years, the longest term ever imposed on a journalist under Hong Kong's national security law. Six former Apple Daily editors and executives, most of whom had pleaded guilty years earlier and testified for the prosecution, received sentences ranging from roughly seven to ten years on the same day. Hong Kong's chief executive, John Lee, defended the outcome in stark terms, saying Lai had committed "numerous heinous crimes" and that his "evil deeds were beyond measure," adding that the sentence "manifests that the rule of law is upheld and justice is done."
The reaction outside Hong Kong was sharply different. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the sentence "unjust and tragic" and said it "shows the world that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms." British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called for humanitarian release, noting that "for the 78 year old, this is tantamount to a life sentence." The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said the verdict "needs to be promptly quashed as incompatible with international law." PEN America's Liesl Gerntholtz put it most starkly: "Jimmy Lai is 78 and this egregious abuse of justice is essentially a death sentence."
The sentence handed to him was the longest ever imposed on a journalist under Hong Kong's national security law. It was announced eighteen days after his own fraud conviction, on an unrelated case, was quietly thrown out.
Seventeen days after the sentencing, on February 26, 2026, a Hong Kong appellate court overturned an entirely separate 2022 fraud conviction against Lai, related to an office lease dispute involving Apple Daily's printing facility, and set aside the five year nine month sentence attached to it. The judges wrote simply that "we allow the appeals, quash the convictions and set aside the sentences," finding the original trial judges' reasoning unsupportable. It changed nothing about the twenty year national security sentence, which remains in force.
Lai's son, Sebastien, has continued to campaign internationally for his father's release, telling the UN Human Rights Council in June 2025 that his father, then seventy seven, "faces the rest of his life in prison for providing an essential service." Former President Donald Trump pledged in August 2025 to do "everything I can to save him" and raised the case directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that October, and again during a Beijing visit in May 2026, after more than one hundred members of the United States Congress had written urging him to do so. As of this writing, Lai remains in Hong Kong custody, and Hong Kong's chief justice has publicly rejected calls for his early release on political grounds, saying the territory's rule of law is "more robust" than any single case.
The closure of Apple Daily itself, more than four years before Lai's conviction, offered an early preview of how the national security law would be applied against the outlet he built. Roughly five hundred police officers raided its headquarters on June 17, 2021, arresting five executives and editors and freezing more than five hundred million Hong Kong dollars in company assets across Lai's businesses; the paper's final print edition on June 24, 2021 ran more than a million copies, twelve times its ordinary run, as readers lined up to buy what they understood would be the last issue. Monitoring the trial itself carried its own risks for outside observers: Aleksandra Bielakowska, a Reporters Without Borders advocacy officer, was detained for roughly six hours and deported from Hong Kong's airport in April 2024 while attempting to observe a hearing, the first such denial of entry the organization had experienced in the territory. "They detained me for six hours, questioned me, and searched me and my belongings several times," she said afterward, a small but telling data point on how far the scrutiny around Lai's case had extended beyond the defendant himself.