Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the Chinese government to provide medical care to the imprisoned journalist, Gao Yu, who is serving seven years for allegedly leaking an internal communist party document that urged greater censorship of reformist ideas.
The 71-year-old is said by her family to be suffering from chronic heart pain, high blood pressure, an inner ear disorder and a chronic skin allergy.
According to Gao, the Beijing No.1 Detention Centre has only administered traditional Chinese medicine for her heart pain, but has not allowed her to take medicines that she took when living at home (and believes are necessary).
“It’s bad enough to imprison a journalist on spurious political grounds, but it’s cruel, degrading and dangerous to then deny necessary medical care,” said Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director.
“The Chinese government should send Gao to a hospital for a thorough assessment of her worsening condition immediately.”
The Beijing government has a long history of persecuting Gao. She was jailed for 14 months for reporting on, and supporting, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
She was imprisoned again from 1993 to 1999 on charges of “illegally providing state secrets abroad” after being accused of leaking policy decisions taken by senior party officials that had already been reported in the Hong Kong press.
In April 2014, she was detained over the latest claim that she leaked a secret document and sentenced in April this year. She has appealed, but it is unclear whether the court will hear her case.
Source: HRW
