LOS ANGELES—Chinese human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng was given high honors by the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) last weekend in a ceremony at the Bacara Resort & Spa in Santa Barbara, California.
Gao, who was given the Courageous Advocacy Award for his work defending the rights of various groups in China, wasn't allowed out of his country to attend the ceremony. That's because the very act of helping others has led to his own persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According to recent reports, Gao has been abducted, and his whereabouts are unknown. Prior to his abduction, he and his family had been under house arrest in Beijing since December 2006.
Gao, known as "China's conscience," has encountered friction with the CCP in defending various special groups. He drew the greatest amount of ire from the CCP after he began to defend and speak out for Falun Gong practitioners, who are being persecuted in China.
After Falun Gong, a mind-body meditation practice, was outlawed in China in 1999, it became an unwritten rule that lawyers could not defend Falun Gong practitioners. When Gao tried to file cases to defend practitioners, he was not allowed to.
Realizing that justice could not be found through the courts, Gao began writing open letters to top CCP officials—including the two highest leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao—calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong.
Following his second letter, his law license was revoked, after which he publicly resigned from the CCP and wrote a third open letter in December, 2005. Later that month, Gao and his family found themselves under constant police surveillance.
Over the last few months, the Global Coalition in Support of Attorney Gao Zhisheng has been working to allow Gao to visit the United States to receive his award in person. ABOTA also sent a letter to CCP officials in an effort to help Gao come to accept the award.
ABOTA president Lewis Sifford said that they "received no acknowledgment or response from the government," and that he was disappointed the CCP would prevent Gao from receiving the award.
The award has been given three times in the 49-year history of ABOTA. The first award was given in 1999 to the families of 24 murdered lawyers and judges who had worked to expose corruption in the Italian legal system. The second, given in 2003, was awarded to 13 Irish judges, barristers, and solicitors who were injured or killed owing to their commitment to the rule of law during social and political upheaval in 1968.
Gao is the first solitary recipient of the award.
The keynote speaker at the awards ceremony, Mr. David Matas, is a Canadian human rights lawyer and co-author of a report investigating allegations of organ harvesting committed against Falun Gong practitioners. Matas said that he and co-investigator David Kilgour "were deeply indebted to him [Gao] not only for his example but also for his analysis and insights."
In their July 2006 report on organ harvesting (which can be found at www.organharvestinvestigation.net), Matas noted, "We did what little we could to protect Gao … by not mentioning him, his invitation nor his open letters against the persecution of the Falun Gong."
Matas continued, "When Gao was almost immediately thereafter arrested, tortured, convicted, and sentenced, we were appalled. But, given what we had learned about the Communist Party of China, we were far from surprised."
Gao was arrested on August 15, after which he was tortured and later convicted of inciting subversion on December 22. He received a sentence of three years, though it was suspended for five years, during which time he was put under house arrest.
In introducing the award, Alan Dunst, Chair of the Awards Committee for ABOTA, noted that articles from The Epoch Times made the award possible, through extensive coverage about Gao's deeds.
One of the speakers at the event, Sherry Zhang, a radio talk show host for the Sound of Hope radio network, was the first overseas journalist to interview Gao, and the first to regularly report on him. She also wrote several guest articles in the Chinese-language Epoch Times of her interviews with Gao.
Zhang described Gao as a man with "a lot of courage, principles, and a great sense of humor."
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