by Elizabeth M. Lynch, China Law & Policy, Mar 28, 2011 —
Gao Zhisheng with his wife, Geng He, and their two children.
Gao Zhisheng is perhaps the most well-known of China’s rights-defending lawyers. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Gao began successfully representing victims of medical malpractice and farmers denied just compensation for their land. In fact, in 2001, Gao was named by China’s Ministry of Justice as one of China’s most influential lawyers. Spurred by his success and what appeared to be a Chinese government welcoming a stronger public interest law bar, Gao expanded his work to included practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious organization which the Chinese government has long feared as a threat to its one-party rule and has declared a cult. Gao’s representation of Falun Gong practitioners did not just highlight the baseless accusations of “using superstitious sects [cults] to undermine the implementation of the law” (China’s Criminal Law, art. 300), but also the torture of Falun Gong practitioners while in police custody (for a seminal article on Gao’s work, see Eva Pils, Asking the Tiger for His Skin: Rights Activism in China, Fordham International Law Journal 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1563706).
Gao’s zealous advocacy of Falun Gong practitioners did not go unnoticed by the Chinese government, and his status as a lawyer to be celebrated for representing society’s most vulnerable, quickly changed. Gao was now viewed as a piranha of the state. . . .
Rights Lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s Wife on His Abduction | China Law & Policy
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