China’s Foreign Minister’s Revelation about Gao Zhisheng Only Leads to More Ambiguity

On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, announced that Gao Zhisheng had been sentenced on subversion charges.  However, Yang’s information stopped there.  He declined to offer more details, or even to say if this was a new conviction or if he was merely referring to Gao Zhisheng’s 2006 sentencing that was suspended for five years.  According to Gao’s lawyer, Mo Shaoping, if the government did decide to cancel the suspension of his 2006 sentence, it would only require a police request and Gao would not be granted a new trial or access to lawyers.  Given Gao’s current, vague detention status, some groups, including the Dui Hua foundation, believe that he is being held outside the legal system by China’s main intelligence agency, the State Security Ministry.  Gao’s friend and fellow lawyer Teng Biao said of Yang’s pronouncement, "Gao Zhisheng's whereabouts are completely unknown. It's completely absurd."

Despite the vague nature of this revelation, at the very least, it is the first admission by the government that Gao was even detained, after he had been missing for over a year.  The announcement also comes a week after a U.N. Torture Investigator expressed concern for Gao’s fate and a group of international lawyers petitioned the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to declare Gao’s detention an international law violation. 

Secretary Clinton Should Raise Issue of China's One Child Policy

(Published March 12, 2010 in the Huffington Post) This Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will mark the fifteenth anniversary of her speech at the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 . Then-First Lady Clinton's remarkable speech represented one of the loudest, clearest calls for all nations to uphold women's rights, and to recognize that "women's rights are human rights." There is much for Secretary Clinton to celebrate this Friday as she reflects upon the progress the world has made towards realizing the goals set at the conference in Beijing fifteen years ago. But the work that began in Beijing is far from finished. One striking example of the continued abuse of women's human rights has remained largely unchanged since 1995, despite the fact that it affects one-fifth of the world's women: China's One Child Policy. (Read more after the jump)