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The devastating result of challenging the Chinese Government

From Australia's Radio Australia:

In just over two weeks, China's leader-in-waiting, Vice President Xi Jinping, will visit Washington DC to meet President Barack Obama.

For Mr Xi, the trip on February 14 is a chance to bolster his foreign policy credentials and to establish personal ties to another of the world's major powers.

It will also be an opportunity for various campaigners to raise issues related to China, one being the continued detention of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.

The group Freedom Now has just filed a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on behalf of Gao Zhisheng.

Correspondent: Liam Cochrane

Speaker: Jared Genser, founder of Freedom Now and one of Gao Zhisheng's international counsel

GENSER: Gao Zhisheng is a Chinese human rights lawyer interestingly was ranked by the China Daily, the state-run newspaper as one of the top ten lawyers in China about a decade ago, where he had more of a corporate law practice. But over the last decade, he started to first represent people whose properties had been wrongly taken away without compensation and then ended up representing a number of victims of human rights abuses and really crossed the line with the Chinese representing Falun Gong practitioners. And he was disappeared, ultimately convicted of subversion and given a five year suspended sentence and over the course of the last five years has spent more than three-and-a-half years in various terms of disappearances, the most recent one has been about 20 months long, although now the Chinese claim to have reappeared him, although no one has still seen him and he's in a prison allegedly in Western China and that three year sentence that he originally received for subversion has been reimposed.

COCHRANE: And during some of these periods of disappearance and imprisonment, he's been subjected to brutal torture that has been unveiled. Can you tell us a little bit of what the Chinese authorities have done to him?

GENSER: Sure, I mean it is about as horrific as it gets. I mean beating him to within an inch of death, piercing his genitals with pins, putting burning cigarettes up to his eyes, to the point that now his tear ducts are permanently damaged and he tears around the clock, tonnes of psychological torture, telling him that his family, his family members have committed suicide or that they were otherwise in bad health or dying or dead and trying to do anything humanly possible to get him to change his attitude toward the Chinese Government and, of course, none of this has been successful, which is precisely why he's had to be disappeared I think from the Chinese government perspective."

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