2014-08-14
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Gao Zhisheng during an interview at his office in Beijing, in a file photo.
AFP
A week after authorities in China released prominent dissident Gao Zhisheng, his wife says he has been severely tortured in jail to a point where a human rights group believes he has been “utterly destroyed.”
“I am completely devastated by what the Chinese government has done to my husband,” U.S.-based Geng He said after speaking with him and hearing from her family about Gao’s “immense suffering” following his release from a prison in the remote Xinjiang region on Aug. 7.
“The only thing I feared more than him being killed was his suffering relentless and horrific torture and being kept alive,” she said, according to a statement by Freedom Now, a Washington-based group which advocates for prisoners of conscience, including Gao.
Freedom Now said the 52-year-old Gao, who is now staying with his wife’s sister in China’s western Xinjiang region, under a round-the-clock watch by Chinese security officials, “has been utterly destroyed.”
“He can barely talk—and only in very short sentences—most of the time he mutters and is unintelligible,” it said. “It is believed he is now suffering from a broad range of physical and mental health problems; he has not been allowed to see a doctor since his release.”
Gao’s international lawyer Jared Genser said he was “heartbroken” for Geng He and her two children who fled to the United States in 2009.
“We knew that if Gao wasn’t killed, he would have suffered immensely. But the situation is far worse than my limited imagination enabled me to contemplate.”
Rights lawyer
Once a prominent lawyer lauded by China’s ruling Communist Party, Gao fell afoul of the government after he defended some of China’s most vulnerable people, including Christians, coal miners, and followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
He has spent most of the last decade repeatedly disappearing into secret jails and undergoing torture.
Since his release from the Xinjiang prison, the family has learned some terrible details about how he was treated in prison, Freedom Now said.
From the time of his reappearance in Shaya prison in December 2011, Gao was held in a small cell, with minimal light and guards were strictly instructed not to speak with him, the rights group said.
