When Beijing Intermediate Court No. 1 convicted Chinese human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng of "inciting subversion," but then suspended the three-year prison sentence for five years and sent him home in December 2006, some saw this as a sign of the Chinese government's greater leniency toward dissidents. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Mr. Gao's most recent "disappearance" sadly illustrates.
Although the government had long resented Mr. Gao's bold legal championing of human-rights victims of all kinds, his ultimate "crime" in the eyes of the state had been to break the public silence about persecution and torture of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians. His release in 2006 was actually a transfer to a new type of "prison en famille." It was a sentence of collective punishment for him, his wife and their two children. The terms of his suspended sentence deprived Mr. Gao of his political rights, including the right to publish. Yet nothing had been stated about 24-hour police surveillance of the entire family, frequent confinement to their apartment in a building from which other tenants had been removed, or repeated abductions and beatings of both Mr. Gao and the family. They lived in constant terror.
When in September 2007 Mr. Gao sent an open letter to the U.S. Congress alleging a number of human-rights abuses in great detail and urging international protests, the authorities decided to teach him another lesson. In a secret location outside Beijing, they tortured him for 13 days, holding burning cigarettes to his eyes and nose, and electrocuting and piercing his genitals, among other techniques. They also told him not to dream of ever returning to the relative security of a normal prison. After several weeks of further detention and interrogation, they sent him home and threatened to torture him in front of his family if he told anyone about his ordeal. His wife, who had already tried to commit suicide, was told that they might yet kill her husband.
SOURCE:
Fears grow that outspoken human rights lawyer has been silenced
Fears that one of China's top human rights lawyers may have died under torture in detention were growing yesterday after a policeman who knew about the details of Gao Zhisheng's arrest said he "went missing" in September last year.
The policeman's claim fuelled speculation that has been circulating for many months that Mr Gao may have been "disappeared" by security forces because of his work defending members of the banned Falun Gong organisation, as well as underground Christian church organisations.
Mr Gao is an active member of the Christian community in the capital and has represented human rights defenders and people suffering persecution for their political or religious beliefs, including members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
He was seen being dragged away by Chinese officials with a black hood over his head.
His wife and children have since fled to the US, where ChinaAid reports that his daughter has been hospitalised because of the stress caused by her father's disappearance.
A number of human rights groups confirmed that Mr Gao went missing "while out on a walk" on 25 September last year, citing police sources.
Mr Gao is the author of one of the most powerful documents to emerge from the Chinese dissident community when he smuggled out a letter describing his treatment by secret police in September 2007.
His torturers described his torment as a 12-course meal, and after each bout they said which course he had just experienced. It is a truly shocking document.
He was accused of being too pro-American, a charge often levelled at dissenters during the Cultural Revolution in 1968.
"Shouldn't we help you have a better lesson?" Mr Gao quotes one torturer as saying.
"You wrote that letter to American Congress. Look at you, you traitor. What could you be given by your American lord? The American Congress counts for nothing. This is China. It is the Communist Party's territory."
Mr Gao was beaten until he could not stop shaking, then stripped and shocked with a cattle prod, on the face, body and genitals.
He says he was beaten until his eyes become swollen shut, that his guards urinated on him and forced him to admit to affairs, details of which were then passed onto his wife.
SOURCE
Although the government had long resented Mr. Gao's bold legal championing of human-rights victims of all kinds, his ultimate "crime" in the eyes of the state had been to break the public silence about persecution and torture of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians. His release in 2006 was actually a transfer to a new type of "prison en famille." It was a sentence of collective punishment for him, his wife and their two children. The terms of his suspended sentence deprived Mr. Gao of his political rights, including the right to publish. Yet nothing had been stated about 24-hour police surveillance of the entire family, frequent confinement to their apartment in a building from which other tenants had been removed, or repeated abductions and beatings of both Mr. Gao and the family. They lived in constant terror.
When in September 2007 Mr. Gao sent an open letter to the U.S. Congress alleging a number of human-rights abuses in great detail and urging international protests, the authorities decided to teach him another lesson. In a secret location outside Beijing, they tortured him for 13 days, holding burning cigarettes to his eyes and nose, and electrocuting and piercing his genitals, among other techniques. They also told him not to dream of ever returning to the relative security of a normal prison. After several weeks of further detention and interrogation, they sent him home and threatened to torture him in front of his family if he told anyone about his ordeal. His wife, who had already tried to commit suicide, was told that they might yet kill her husband.
SOURCE:
Fears grow that outspoken human rights lawyer has been silenced
Fears that one of China's top human rights lawyers may have died under torture in detention were growing yesterday after a policeman who knew about the details of Gao Zhisheng's arrest said he "went missing" in September last year.
The policeman's claim fuelled speculation that has been circulating for many months that Mr Gao may have been "disappeared" by security forces because of his work defending members of the banned Falun Gong organisation, as well as underground Christian church organisations.
Mr Gao is an active member of the Christian community in the capital and has represented human rights defenders and people suffering persecution for their political or religious beliefs, including members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
He was seen being dragged away by Chinese officials with a black hood over his head.
His wife and children have since fled to the US, where ChinaAid reports that his daughter has been hospitalised because of the stress caused by her father's disappearance.
A number of human rights groups confirmed that Mr Gao went missing "while out on a walk" on 25 September last year, citing police sources.
Mr Gao is the author of one of the most powerful documents to emerge from the Chinese dissident community when he smuggled out a letter describing his treatment by secret police in September 2007.
His torturers described his torment as a 12-course meal, and after each bout they said which course he had just experienced. It is a truly shocking document.
He was accused of being too pro-American, a charge often levelled at dissenters during the Cultural Revolution in 1968.
"Shouldn't we help you have a better lesson?" Mr Gao quotes one torturer as saying.
"You wrote that letter to American Congress. Look at you, you traitor. What could you be given by your American lord? The American Congress counts for nothing. This is China. It is the Communist Party's territory."
Mr Gao was beaten until he could not stop shaking, then stripped and shocked with a cattle prod, on the face, body and genitals.
He says he was beaten until his eyes become swollen shut, that his guards urinated on him and forced him to admit to affairs, details of which were then passed onto his wife.
SOURCE
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