Portraits of Defenders | Chinese Human Rights Defenders

Chen Guangcheng (陈光诚)

January 10, 2011 Comments Off

Chen Guangcheng, a rural “barefoot lawyer,” campaigned for the rights of villagers and the disabled. He provided free legal consultation to these groups from 1996 until he was detained in the fall of 2005, after he and his wife began to investigate villagers’ claims of excessive violence in the implementation (read more…)

Cao Haibo (曹海波)

January 1, 2011 Comments Off

Cao Haibo, a worker at an Internet café in Yunnan Province and organizer of a website that promotes democracy, was sentenced to eight years in prison for expressing his political views online. Born in 1985, Cao was detained in October 2011 and later arrested for “inciting subversion of state power.”