Wife of Missing Human Rights Lawyer Pens Plea: ‘Help My Husband’
Geng He says her family’s first reaction was joy when a Chinese official commented last month that her missing lawyer husband was “where he should be” following a judicial proceeding.
The pronouncement indicated her husband was alive, Geng concluded. “Then we started thinking about what ‘alive’ meant,” Geng writes in the Washington Post. “The last time my husband was arrested, the government tortured him. After he sent a letter to the U.S. Congress in 2007 denouncing human rights abuses in China, the government held him for more than 50 days. His captors electrocuted him. They burned his eyes with lit cigarettes. They stuck toothpicks in his genitals.”
Geng and her two children escaped from China last year shortly before her husband disappeared. Now she is asking the country that granted her shelter, the United States, to intervene.
“I must ask my new country to help my husband, the father of my two children. China won’t listen to me,” she writes. “If our relatives who remain in China press the government too hard, they will be arrested. But China will listen to the United States.”
Geng writes of her fears that intimidation by the Chinese government will deter the next generation from becoming lawyers–the professionals who are her country’s only hope for democracy.
“My 8-year old son, Peter, was surprised to discover last week that President Obama is a lawyer,” she writes. “To him, lawyers are people the government throws into prison, not leaders of the government itself. He asked me whether this meant that President Obama could help free his father. I told him that I hoped so. We are waiting to see.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Chinese Official Says Missing Human Rights Lawyer Is ‘Where He Should Be’ ”
New York Times: “How the Family of a Dissident Fled China”
