There is still no news of the Tibetan scholar monk Jigme Guri, who was detained on 20 August in Tsoe, a Tibetan area of Gansu province, by the Chinese police. Jigme Guri, also known as Labrang Jigme (from the name of his monastery, Labrang), is the first Tibetan inside Tibet to have made a video available on Youtube without withholding his identity, giving a detailed account of his own torture in custody, and expressing his anguish about the Chinese policy against the Dalai Lama.

In the meantime, a Chinese civil rights lawyer who sought to defend Jigme Guri and other Tibetans has spoken publicly about his own torture and interrogation, almost a year after his monk client’s.

Jiang Tianyong is one of China’s lawyers and legal experts facing an increasingly deadly struggle in seeking to protect and defend civil rights through litigation and legal activism. Now, like several of his clients, Jiang Tianyong has faced detention and interrogation himself, as one of dozens of Chinese lawyers, bloggers and activists who “disappeared” as part of a crackdown on dissent in China from February onwards.

Few have spoken publicly about their ordeal, but last week Jiang Tianyong gave a detailed account of his two-month imprisonment. He described how at one point after being kicked and punched, he appealed to his interrogator, saying: “I am a human being, you are a human being. Why are you doing something so inhumane?” Enraged, the man knocked Jiang to the floor and screamed: “You are not a human being!” (This appeared in South China Morning Post, on 14 September).

This article first appeared in The Sunday Guardian” on 25 September.  To read the full article view: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/courage-of-a-tibetan-monk-and-his-chinese-lawyer

To take part in the ‘Where Is Jigme Guri? visual petition visit: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5380/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8032

Kate Saunders the Communications Director of International Campaign for Tibet.