On Human Rights Day this year, the day on which imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, I was in Beijing, where the authorities' angry clampdown on dissent had brought about an eerie hush among those aware of the occasion. Scores of activists had been placed under house arrest, deprived of internet and phone services, or 'vacationed' out of town to ensure their silence.
Seeking to mark the day beyond my academic meetings, I visited Ni Yulan, a courageous former lawyer who was permanently crippled by police in 2002 in retaliation for her defence of human rights. Ni first came to public attention in the summer because she and her husband had been reduced to living in a Beijing park. Thanks to overseas publicity and Emergency Shelter, independent director He Yang's video about the couple, they now share a small room in a run-down hotel, watched and occasionally harassed by the authorities. It was there that we talked about the plight of human rights lawyers in China.
Ni chose to study law just as legal education was reviving after the Cultural Revolution. Upon graduation from the elite China University of Political Science and Law, in the mid-1980s, she became a lawyer for a government export company. It was only in 1999 that she became embroiled in human rights issues when a neighbourhood family was victimised by the brutal Communist Party campaign against the Falun Gong. First the neighbour's mother, then the father, died in detention in circumstances that were never investigated. When no one else offered legal help in so sensitive a matter, Ni felt she could not refuse. 'It was from then on that the police targeted me,' she says.
Her second human rights case involved another major issue, forced housing demolition. In April 2002, following her efforts to help neighbours facing compulsory eviction and relocation, Beijing police dragged her to a police station and tortured her expertly for many hours. 'They said I was minding too many things that are not my business,' she says.
In Emergency Shelter, she recalls, 'they pushed me to the ground, then they took a rope and tied me up in a sort of bundle. And after tying me up, they pulled the rope upward. At the time I could hear a cracking sound in my ribs, and then I was in unbearable pain. I started crying ... [Later, they] used their feet and their knees to press against my [lower] back, the bone gaps, the acupuncture points, the tendons and bones. They really knew how to beat people up.'
After a long detention, Ni was belatedly taken to hospital and then prosecuted for 'obstructing an officer'. 'I tried to hire a lawyer but they would not let me; nor would they let me appeal when I was convicted. They said I was a special case because I was opposing the government.'
She was sentenced to one year in jail. Because of her criminal conviction, her lawyer's licence was permanently revoked. 'I kept sending letters to the lawyers' association asking them to help me, but they would just say they had not received any letter.' Worse than the loss of her profession, Ni never recovered the use of her legs.