Karma Samdrup, a prominent Tibetan businessman and environmentalist, was arrested in early 2010 on the charge of excavating and robbing ancient tombs, and later sentenced to 15 years in prison. The alleged crime of “grave-robbing” stemmed from Xinjiang police charging Karma in 1998 with purchasing $10,000 worth of goods.
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Sichuan dissident and poet Li Bifeng (李必丰) was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined 300,000 yuan on a seemingly concocted charge of “contract fraud” in addition to a request to return 3 million yuan that he supposedly embezzled from a company.
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Originally from Guangxi Province, Chen Xi (aka Chen Youcai [陈友才]) has been a member of the Guizhou Human Rights Forum, which was declared by Guizhou authorities to be an “illegal organization” on December 5, 2011—a week after his most recent arrest and just prior to UN Human Rights Day.
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Chen Wei has been frequently harassed by police, placed under tight surveillance, and has had restrictions placed on his movement, including at least one occasion in which he was prevented from leaving the country. Chen was taken into custody during the “Jasmine Revolution” crackdown in February 2011.
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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…)
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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.”
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