PRESS RELEASE
Beijing time 19:30, Monday 13 May 2024

So far, we have not received any confirmation that #ZhangZhan has left the prison and is home with her family.

We understand that Zhang Zhan’s family have been under enormous pressure and warned severely not to give media interviews. Friends' calls have also been left without answers. At least one Shanghai-based activist has been summoned by police for talking about getting Zhang Zhan from prison on 13 May with her mother. A Henan-based activist has been intercepted at a train station en route to Shanghai; she wanted to greet Zhang Zhan or at least show solidarity with her outside Shanghai Women’s Prison. See this report by Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch (https://t.co/W4SZKrQfJb) for more details.

These are extremely worrying signs. If Zhang Zhan faces the same situation as her fellow rights activist Chen Jianfang (who has been placed under house arrest by Shanghai authorities since October 2023, when she was released from prison), she will have little chance of getting urgently needed, long-overdue medical treatment and recuperation.

It is totally unacceptable that the Chinese government subject many human rights defenders and their families to this kind of cruelty. Even after their release from prison, they are still deprived of their basic rights. For some, it's like they've been given a life sentence.

Zhang Zhan should have regained her freedom. We should have heard from her or her family by now. Instead, we are left wondering where she is, how she is doing physically and mentally, what’s happened to her family, and what the future holds for her: A prisoner in her own home (like Chen Jianfang)? Detention in a medical facility without access to her family (like Hubei-based activist Yin Xu’an)? Forced disappearance (like human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng)?

The silence speaks volumes. We call on the international society to hold the Chinese Communist regime accountable for its horrendous practice of ‘soft detention’ or ‘non-release release’ of former political prisoners.

Jane Wang
#FreeZhangZhan campaign

https://t.co/XrBB0zdwA7

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