Amid China’s crackdown on those who challenge its system, Chinese human rights lawyers face life in jail as their families move on with their lives.
Wang Quanzhang, one of the human rights lawyers who were detained last year, is still in jail since July last year while his 3-year-old son is asking his mother where his father went.
In a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Li Wenzu, Wang's wife, described how hard it was to explain to their toddler what really happened to his father.
"My son always asks me, 'Where's Dad? Where did he go? How come he hasn't come back yet?' He's just a three-year-old boy, I can't tell him that Dad's been detained because of some cases he was working on," she told the outlet.
"So I just tell a white lie--I say he's away for work and he thinks about you all the time," she added.
Detention
Ten months ago, over 200 human rights lawyers and advocates were taken into custody and detained or "incitement to subversion" and "subversion of state power."
China Digital Times reported that while most of them have been released, they remain under constant surveillance and harassment.
Those who were kept in detention were not allowed to speak to their families.
"No one's been able to see him, there's been no information on his condition. If he's been tortured, we don't have the faintest clue," Li told ABC.
Wang was among several human rights attorneys who were detained in July 2015 and was finally charged in January this year.
According to BBC News, seven lawyers who were employees at the Fengrui law firm in Beijing might face at least 15 years imprisonment should they be proven guilty of "subversion."
Violation of Human Rights
While they were seen by their clients as champions for defending their rights, China appears to have neglected the human rights lawyers' own basic rights.
The Human Rights Watch has already urged Chinese authorities to "release and drop the charges" for the remaining rights advocates who are held under detention.
According to the organization, Chinese law dictates that the prosecutor's office should have already decided whether or not to extend the lawyers' pretrial detentions.
"China's trumped-up cases against 18 rights advocates make President Xi Jinping's claims of embracing the rule of law ring hollow," said HRW's China director Sophie Richardson. "The detainees have been denied key legal protections by being accused of bogus offenses, not having access to family and counsel, and being held in secret."
HRW also noted how some of the detainees were humiliated in public by broadcasting interrogations and have been denied access to their lawyers that left them "vulnerable to ill-treatment in detention."