(LifeSiteNews) — The daughter of pro-democracy activist, businessman, former newspaper owner, and Catholic convert Jimmy Lai has spoken out for the first time since her father’s incarceration five years ago as his trial under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law (NSL) continues to plod along. 

In an EWTN video interview and in a Washington Post Op-Ed, Clarie Lai says that her father, who just turned 78 years old, is languishing in prison, “shrinking to nothing. If China fails to act, he’ll be a martyr.”

“My father is suffering from rapidly deteriorating health,” Claire wrote in the Post. “He has diabetes and hypertension, his hearing and vision are failing, he has suffered from months-long infections and is in constant pain that sometimes leaves him struggling even to stand up. But the most visible and alarming sign of his plight is severe weight loss.”

“His decline has become a constant concern for our family,” Lai’s daughter said. “We know little of the medical care he might receive, because no outside physician has been allowed to examine him.”  

Lai said that her father is kept in a cell “without direct access to sunlight or fresh air. My heart breaks thinking of his enduring five sweltering Hong Kong summers in a tiny, airless concrete box with a bed as tough as a wooden plank.”

“In summer, the heat can get up to … 111 degrees Fahrenheit,” she recounted. “To say that it’s sweltering is a massive understatement.”

“He gets heat rushes all over his body, and they last until the middle of autumn. It is outrageous, and it is torturous,” she declared.

Torture extends to the realm of the spiritual in that Lai has been starved of the Eucharist and deprived of his Rosary. 

“He’s been denied holy Communion for over two years and got it only very, very intermittently this year,” she told EWTN News president and COO Montse Alvarado. “It’s something that costs them nothing … for him to get. It costs them nothing for him to get the rosary, and it costs them nothing to turn on the light so that he can read the Gospel.”

“People often ask how he is coping,” Claire noted. “His religious faith sustains him. He says God is with him at every step, prayer brings him joy, and the prayers of others bring him a lightness of being. The first thing he asked me to bring him after he was arrested was the Bible he kept on his nightstand at home.”

“I think there isn’t anything quite as much as suffering that opens your heart to God’s love. We are so grateful that Our Lord has accompanied my father. He wakes up around midnight every night to pray,” Claire told EWTN.

“Before the crack of dawn, he would read the Gospel,” Lai said. “At first, he would ask the guards if they could turn on the light so that he could read … For about the first six months, they said ‘yes.’ Afterwards, they always said ‘no.’”

“He is innocent of any crime,” Claire declared. “But even though the Chinese government disagrees, I believe that setting him free would be to the government’s advantage. He has suffered enough, and unless something changes, he is very likely to become a martyr for freedom.”

Lai’s father, Jimmy — a British national — was sentenced to a six-year jail term in December 2022 on the charge of “fraud.” According to news outlet Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), at Lai’s 2022 sentencing, the judge also imposed “an eight-year disqualification order to Lai and ordered the media tycoon to pay HK$2 million in fines.”

The businessman was brought into the Catholic faith by fellow Hong Kong resident Cardinal Joseph Zen and has been a strong and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its measures against freedom.

He founded the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily in 1995, which published criticism of the CCP that earned it the ire of the communist authorities. The newspaper became one of the leading outlets in Hong Kong before its forced closure by the authorities.

“As Our Lady has taught us, there is nothing that conquers doubt and fear except for the love of God. And that was a time when he was ready to receive it,” Claire noted. “My father converted one year after I was born. Really, the only memories I have are of growing up in a very loving Catholic family.”