The vast majority of domestic violence cases in Macao are not brought before a court, with TDM reporting that the Public Prosecutor’s Office only managed to successfully prosecute 8 percent of the more than 700 cases it received since the Domestic Violence Act was enacted in 2016.
The Social Welfare Bureau noted that between 2016 and 2021, there were over 15,000 reports of domestic violence, of which 366 were categorised as confirmed.
During this period, the Public Prosecutor’s Office managed to bring only 42 such cases to court. Last year, the office managed to bring charges on just 11 out of the 109 cases brought to its attention.
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In an interview with the Macao Post Daily last year, former legislator Agnes Lam Iok Fong, said that more needs to be done by the government to ensure that domestic violence victims are receiving the long-term support and follow up that they require.
In 2023, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights met with local officials to express concern about what it saw as a lack of domestic violence protections in Macao.
The committee said it was “concerned that the law on preventing and combating domestic violence does not cover same-sex couples, and about reports of its insufficient implementation in the context of a relatively high report rate with the conversely proportionate low investigation and low prosecution rate.”
