The first national security case in Macao is closed to the court: the district is under trial and the public cannot see how the prosecution can prove “subversive”.

The court opened, but the public couldn't get in.

On 16 September, the Macao Basic Court heard a new case involving former Legislative Assembly members, Zhang Jin. This was the first national security case in the country that had entered the trial stage since the implementation of the Law on the Protection of National Security. The court was not open to the public, and journalists were not able to enter the court to see how the prosecution and the defence presented their evidence and how they were examined. > The Macao Government Press Office subsequently published a judicial statement: the Full Court decided that the hearing should be held in camera on the grounds that public hearings could “seriously impair national security interests”.

This sentence has created a special situation from the outset in the first national court in Macao: society knows that a person is being tried for a suspected offence against national security, but cannot directly observe how the State can prove this allegation.

Something that you can confirm outside the door.

The District Jinxin has long served as a member of the Macao Legislative Assembly and participated in the HDZO and the 64th commemoration. /a" when the Macao Judicial Police published the arrest in July 2025, a Macao resident was suspected of having published "seditional information" on a large number of websites outside Macao since 2022 and of having sent it to organizations outside Macao The authorities conduct investigations on the basis of “false and inflammatory information” allegedly in violation of the Law on the Protection of National Security. Public reports subsequently confirmed the arrest as a regional success story.

In April this year, the Public Prosecutor's Office announced the completion of investigations and filed complaints concerning charges of “offences against the State” and “offences of acts against the security of the State by establishing contact with organizations, groups or individuals outside the Macao Special Administrative Region”. Zhu Jinxian has been in detention since his arrest.

These are the contours of cases that can be spelled out outside the Tribunal. But the part that really determines criminal responsibility — which articles or statements are included in evidence, which offshore links are found to constitute crimes, how the prosecution proves subjective intent, and how the defence rejects them — has left the public eye with closed hearings.

The Macao courts have given reasons not to protect the privacy of witnesses or to involve minors, but to protect national security interests themselves.

The first case, it became the first procedural test.

The Macao National Security Act came into force in 2009 and was substantially revised in 2023 to expand the relevant crime and law enforcement framework. For many years, the law did not result in criminal cases going to public trial. The District Peace Initiative case thus involved more than one accused and, for the first time, showed the outside world how the national security system, following the law reform, actually entered the criminal courts.

But the public first saw a closed door.

Closed trials do not amount to a case per se being unlawful, and many judicial systems allow for restrictions on public hearings when State secrets, minors or specific security risks are involved. The key difference is that the principle of publicity in criminal trials was originally an external oversight function: the public was able to know how the prosecution used State power, how the court examined the evidence, how the accused exercised his right to defence and what the final decision was based on.

When the name of the case is itself “national security”, and national security is the reason for the closed trial, there is a cycle of such oversight: the more serious the charges, the more the public needs to understand the evidence; However, the more the case is found to be security-related, the less evidence the public can see.

The new political career of the district is suspended from the dock.

The region is not suddenly a strange name in a national security case. He has been a member of the Legislative Council of Macao since 2001 and has been a permanent participant in labour, social welfare and democratic reform, as well as in the annual 64th observance of Macao. After the continued contraction of the political space of the PD, he ceased to stand for election to the Legislative Council in 2021.

Today, political expressions that could have appeared in Parliament, street celebrations and public articles have been placed in the evidentiary framework for criminal cases. The prosecution will eventually prove what evidence will be admitted to the court and should still await confirmation in the decision-making documents; The charges cannot be directly considered as established criminal facts as a result of prosecution.

However, the trial process itself has produced a fact that cannot be observed without a judgement: the first national security case in Macao did not show the public the course of its examination of evidence.

A precedent case ultimately left more than the question of “guilty or guilt”. This trial may also become a point of reference in the future when Macao is being prosecuted for articles, political contacts, foreign organization or other national security charges. The first case, how the crime boundary is explained, how evidence is handled, how the defence is safeguarded and what can be seen by the public, may affect the understanding of the actual boundaries of the law by those who come to a later stage.

The court ' s doors could be closed for legal reasons, but it took away the opportunity for the public to examine the judicial process first-hand. This was in itself one of the most important procedural facts left behind by the first national trial in Macao on 16 September.