My husband Gao Zhisheng is a renowned lawyer in China. He has always fought for the rights for his clients, and he has always tried his best to provide free service to the poor. Money and power can never seduce him; the evil and the dark forces can never coerce him to give in. He has been promoting justice, righteousness, and human rights to Chinese people, making use of his role as a lawyer. His sense of justice and his outstanding eloquence have even moved the hearts of judges in the Chinese communist system. However, such a great lawyer who wholeheartedly served the people is oppressed and brutally persecuted by Chinese communist authorities.
The Chinese regime shut down his law office, and suspended his lawyer’s license. On Aug. 15, 2006, unexpectedly police abducted him, and charged him with “inciting others to overturn state power.” He was sentenced to three years in prison, with a five-year probation and deprivation of all political rights for one year. During the five-year probation, Gao was abducted and went missing more than six times.
When Gao was abducted on Sept. 21, 2007, he suffered shockingly cruel torture by Chinese communist police. Six to seven policemen covered his head with a black hood and took him into a room, where they stripped off all his clothes and beat him fiercely. Immediately after the beating, four police used four electric batons to shock him all over his body, specifically his private parts. Gao shivered and trembled from excruciating pain, sweating profusely, and rolling on the floor in unbearable pain.
The repeated shocks continued for several hours. Gao passed out many times, and was on the verge of death.
The next morning, they used five cigarettes to blow smoke into Gao’s nose and eyes, and stabbed his private parts with tooth picks. They tortured him in different kinds of ways until the afternoon if the third day. At that time, Gao struggled to get away from them. He called out our two children’s names loudly, and at the same time banged his head into the desk, trying to commit suicide to end the pain. His eyes and head were severely injured, with blood covering his entire face.
Gao asked the police to lock him up in the prison, but the police replied: “You are simply dreaming if you want to go to prison. We can make you disappear whenever we want to.”
They continued to torture Gao until the evening. In the end, Gao could not open his eyes because the cigarette smoke made his eyes terribly swollen. His skin was all black from the electric shocks, without even a tiny part of normal skin on his entire body. This was just one of the many tortures Gao has suffered.
In order to protect our two children from the extreme terror, I took our daughter and son to escape from China in January 2009.
Gao was abducted and went missing again on Feb. 9, 2009. One year later, in April 2010, Gao made one short public appearance, with the arrangement of Chinese communist authorities, to accept an interview from the Associate Press. During the interview, he did not comply with orders from the authorities, and exposed the torture he had suffered to the Associate Press. Since then, he has been missing again, and no outsider knows his whereabouts.
Based on the three years prison sentence with five-years probation that he had been given, Gao should have come home on Aug. 15 of this year, after serving a full five-year probation term.
I am extremely worried. I do not know how my husband has lived through all those excruciating tortures that make one want to die rather than stay alive. I do not even know whether he is still alive, with unyielding courage, or whether he has passed away. My daughter misses her father so much that she suffered a mental breakdown and had to get psychological treatment.
A reporter asked my children how they would feel if they were to see their father. My son said, “I would cry a lot, because I finally get to see my father.”
My daughter said: “In many of my dreams I dreamt that my father died. I long to see my father and have the chance to tell him I love him.”
Undoubtedly, the torture and persecution of my husband by the Chinese communist regime has violated both international human rights treaties, and its own constitution. From the torture my husband has been subjected to, we can see that Chinese communist regime is simply deceiving the international community when saying it has made improvements in China’s human rights.
I ask the international community and western media to treat human rights as top priority, and to honestly report my husband’s case, so as to give the Chinese communist regime pressure to release my husband. I hope that with your help my husband will regain his freedom, and our family can be together again.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to present this request. It is my greatest hope to work with everyone and to contribute to the international human rights undertaking.
This article is adapted from a speech Geng He gave at the Global Summit Against Discrimination and Persecution (ngosummit.org), held in New York City on Sept. 21, 2011.
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