Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), a prominent human rights lawyer whose 13-month disappearance at the hands of Chinese security agents stirred an international outcry until he resurfaced in March, has again vanished, his friends said on Friday.
Associates said Gao failed to return to a Beijing apartment on April 20 after spending more than a week in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, where he had been visiting his father-in-law.
Gao telephoned his father-in-law as his plane left Urumqi, saying he would call upon his arrival in Beijing, they said.
That appeared to be his last contact with the outside world. Li Heping (李和平), another Beijing human rights lawyer and a close friend, said he had visited Gao’s apartment repeatedly, but had not found him.
“No one had been there for a while,” said Li, who last went to the apartment on Thursday. “I have no idea who to call, or who has taken him.”
Others said they were sure that the government had again removed him from public view and that the authorities’ earlier decision to allow him to resurface briefly had been a ploy to try to demonstrate to the outside world that he had not been mistreated.
“Now we understand that the freedom was arranged by the authorities just for a show,” Jiang Tianyong (江天勇), a Beijing lawyer and rights activist, said by telephone. “He is missing again; he is still under their control. We must continue to pay attention to his case.”
An official of Amnesty International said on Friday that the organization was “seriously concerned” for Gao’s safety.
“It’s a matter of serious concern when he loses contact with his family and friends,” Catherine Baber, the organization’s deputy director for Asia and Pacific programs, said in a telephone interview from London.
Gao, whose outspoken approach has made him a contentious figure, is one of the country’s best-known activists. He has also been a ceaseless gadfly to Chinese authorities.
In the early 2000s he earned international attention, and the government’s enmity, for his legal work on behalf of marginalized citizens, including members of underground Christian churches and practitioners of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that Chinese authorities say is an antigovernment cabal.
After Gao sent letters to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), accusing the government of persecuting Falun Gong members, he was stripped of his law license and sentenced to prison in late 2006 on charges of inciting subversion.
After being released, Gao said he had been tortured, adding that he had also been warned that discussing his torture publicly would result in his death.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) denied those claims at a news conference in March.
“There is no such thing as him being tortured,” he said.
Gao and his family were under constant surveillance and harassment after his release. Early last year his wife and two children escaped from eventually gaining asylum in the US.
Gao disappeared shortly afterward. Despite pleas from the US, the EU and the UN, he was not seen again until he appeared in March at a Buddhist monastery in northern China.
In a telephone interview then with the New York Times, he said he had given up his work as a human rights defender and merely sought “to calm down and lead a quiet life.”
He refused to say whether he had suffered mistreatment while in captivity. In an April 7 interview with The Associated Press, he said simply: “I don’t have the capacity to persevere.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate
RSS