Xu Zhiyong, April 9, 2023 Dr. Xu Zhiyong (许志永) is no stranger to those who have followed the emergence of civil society in China in the early 2000s to its being silenced by the continuous suppression, more severe under Xi Jinping. Xu Zhiyong’s career began from providing legal assistance along with a team of rights lawyers to disadvantaged [...] Keep reading »

Ding Jiaxi, April 9, 2023 After a decade-long successful career as a successful commercial lawyer in Beijing, Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜) joined the New Citizens Movement in 2011 led by legal scholar Xu Zhiyong (许志永). The citizen movement chiefly concerned itself with calling upon Chinese to become true citizens, exercising their rights and should [...] Keep reading »

Chow Hang-tung, December 22, 2022 In September 2021, the National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force accused the Hong Kong Alliance of being a “foreign proxy,” demanded organizational documents from the seven members of the Alliance’s Standing Committee, and arrested five of them after the demand was rejected. Two of the five p [...] Keep reading »

July 25, 2022 China Disbars Lawyers to Remove a Perceived Threat / 中國人權律师被剝奪執業權 In a very real sense, the 709 Crackdown is still ongoing. Over the years following the initial campaign to arrest and torture human rights lawyers, China has disbarred over 40 lawyers for representing clients in human rights cases. As recently as [...] Keep reading »

Li Fangping, July 9, 2022 Li Fangping started practicing law in China in the mid-1990s, first in Jiangxi and then in Beijing. Over the years since the onset of the rights defense movement in the early 2000s, he has been one of the leading human rights lawyers and has defensed clients in nearly all types of human rights and public interest cases, in [...] Keep reading »

By Xu Zhiyong, translated by Andréa Worden, June 21, 2022 After being released from prison in July 2017, Xu Zhiyong devoted a year to writing “A Beautiful China” that was posted on his blog. This is Chapter 13 of the book. Xu’s career as a civil rights leader has spanned two decades since the early 2000s. He was imprisoned from 2013 to2017. [...] Keep reading »

Xu Zhiyong, June 18, 2022 This autobiographical essay was written shortly before his arrest in 2013. It was translated into English and first published in Xu Zhiyong’s collection of essays “To Build a Free China – A Citizen’s Journey” in 2017. We make this important essay available to online readers before Xu Zhiyong&# [...] Keep reading »

June 16, 2022 The sixth annual China Human Rights Lawyers Day will be held virtually on July 9, 2022, at 9 a.m. EST (U.S.). In 2017, human rights organizations in the U.S., Taiwan, and Hong Kong established July 9th as the China Human Rights Lawyers day to commemorate the mass arrests, detention, and torture of human rights lawyers in mainland Chin [...] Keep reading »

"Rights defense lawyers" emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. From their appearance, to the notorious 709 mass arrests in 2015, to today, the Chinese Communist government has subjected them to intimidation, disappearance, torture, imprisonment, and disbarment, ignoring the UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers. This 68-minute document [...] Keep reading »