Reporter Gao faces charges of revealing state secrets while Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti’s life sentence appeal rejected.
Last updated: 21 Nov 2014 08:55
Chinese authorities have put on trial an outspoken journalist accused of revealing state secrets and rejected an appeal by a prominent Uighur scholar whose life sentence on separatism charges had sparked an outcry from the West.
The closed-door trial of Gao Yu, 70, accused of providing state secrets to foreign contacts, began on Friday morning in a Beijing court.
Gao, who is well known for her critical articles of government leaders, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
In a separate case, Ilham Tohti, China’s most prominent advocate for the rights of Muslim Uighur people, heard on Friday he lost his appeal in a detention centre in the northwestern Xinjiang region.
President Xi Jinping’s government has convicted and detained hundreds of people in what rights groups say is the most severe assault on human rights in China since the 1989 crackdown on a pro-democracy movement around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
“The logic behind all of this is that their sense of crisis is getting worse and the regime is feeling more and more insecure,” said Zhang Lifan, an independent political commentator in Beijing.
‘Greater censorship’
Tohti, a 44-year-old economics professor, was jailed for life in September after being placed in detention for 10 months.
