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With the world’s
attention on the uprisings in the Middle East, repressive regimes
elsewhere are taking the opportunity to tighten their grip on power. In
China, human rights activists have been disappearing since a call went
out last month for a Tunisian-style “Jasmine Revolution.” I know what
their families are going through. Almost a year ago, the Chinese
government seized my husband and since then, we have had no news of
him. I don’t know where he is, or even if he is alive.

In 2001, the
Ministry of Justice listed my husband, Gao Zhisheng, as one of the top
10 lawyers in China. But when he began representing members of
religious groups persecuted by the government, he became a target
himself. His law license was revoked, and our family placed under
constant surveillance. In 2006, he was convicted of inciting subversion
based on a confession he made after his interrogators threatened our
two children. He received a suspended sentence, but was briefly
detained again a year later for writing an open letter to the U.S.
Congress documenting human rights abuses in China.

Zhisheng wouldn’t
give up his work, and yet he was frightened for me and our children, so
I fled with them to asylum in the United States. Soon after we left, in
February 2009, he was seized by security officials, and that time held
without charges for more than a year. International pressure persuaded
the government to release him. But two weeks later, as soon as the
world’s attention moved elsewhere, he was abducted again. That was last
April. No one has heard from him since.

We have good cause
to fear that he is suffering. My husband has been tortured many times.
In 2007, officials subjected him to electric shocks, held lighted
cigarettes up to his eyes and pierced his genitals with toothpicks. In
2009, the police beat him with handguns for two days. He has been tied
up and forced to sit motionless for hours, threatened with death and
told that our children were having nervous breakdowns.

Though his
treatment has been especially harsh, my husband is only one of many
political prisoners in China. Among them are Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel
Peace Prize laureate, who is serving an 11-year sentence for
subversion, and his wife, Liu Xia, who is under house arrest. A human
rights group reports that more than a hundred bloggers and rights
advocates have been interrogated or detained in connection to the
“Jasmine Revolution.” And especially ominous have been the
disappearances of other prominent human rights lawyers, like Jiang
Tianyong, Teng Biao and Tang Jitian.

In Barack Obama’s
speech to the United Nations last year, he said “freedom, justice and
peace for the world must begin with freedom, justice and peace in the
lives of individual human beings.” The Chinese government must not be
allowed to claim that China is a nation operating under the rule of law
while persecuting those who try to ensure that it respects the law. And
when the government silences dissent, the international community must
speak up. Indeed, I am excited to have just learned that the United
Nations has demanded that my husband be released, and hopeful that it
will take a stand for the other prisoners as well. I appeal to Obama –
a father, lawyer and leader of the country that has become my family’s
new home – to make sure it does so. At the very least, he should ask
President Hu Jintao to let Zhisheng contact us.

If he has been killed, we should be allowed the dignity of laying him to rest.

Geng He is the wife of a human rights lawyer missing in China. This essay was translated from the Chinese New York Times