Gao Xiaobo disappeared for nine years: the human rights lawyer who disappeared from Shaanxi Cave, has not yet received a legal notice of detention

On August 13, 2017, Gao Xiaobo disappeared from his home in Elin City, Shaanxi province.

Nine years later, more and more facts could be confirmed by time, and the information he himself could be confirmed still remained on that day.

He has been one of China’s most renowned human rights lawyers, acting as a representative of Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, victims of forced displacement and other politically sensitive cases. Since 2005, he has been pressured for publicly criticizing the way authorities deal with religious and human rights cases, and has subsequently experienced revocation of licenses, surveillance, detention, sentencing and multiple disappearances.

In 2006, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment and five years of imprisonment for "incitement to subversion of the state regime." In the following years, he was secretly taken away and publicly described as being tortured during his detention. At the end of 2011, Chinese officials announced that he was sentenced to three years in prison for violating the provisions of imprisonment; after his sentence in August 2014, he was not really restored to freedom, but was in a long-term state of strict surveillance and practical detention in Shaanxi. The database of individual cases of the International Religious Freedom Commission of the United States is still recorded, and he disappeared on August 13, 2017, with the status of "Unknown".

The disappearance of 2017 has thus become the second, longer time line. Families and human rights organizations have since repeatedly asked the Chinese government to disclose where they are located. The United Nations Special Procedure Mechanism has also negotiated with the Chinese government about the disappearance of Cao Cao. Over the past nine years, the outside world has still been unable to access public information that could prove his state of freedom, place of detention and physical condition.

On August 13, the Defense Network again released a case update, confirming that as of the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of Cao Cheng, it is still unable to reach its location.

Nine years have changed the nature of the case.

A citizen who is subject to criminal detention in accordance with the law shall have a detention body; if arrested, shall have a detention place; if prosecuted, shall have a prosecutor's office and case number; if convicted, shall have a court sentence and a prison.

But for nine years, neither of these states has been able to get a clear explanation from the Chinese government.

This is the most dangerous place for forced disappearance.The state authority does not need to publicly announce how many years a person has been sentenced, but only needs to get him out of the public eye, while cutting off the channels of family, lawyers and society to confirm his place of residence, can put a citizen in a legal black hole for a long time.

The case is symbolic because he himself is a lawyer.He used to rely on Chinese law to defend others, but eventually entered a state where even the most basic legal procedures could not be publicly confirmed.

From the practice repression in 2005, to the criminal conviction in 2006; from the subsequent secret detention and torture charges, to the continued surveillance after the sentence in 2014, to the complete loss of public position on August 13, 2017, Gao Xiaobo experienced not an isolated law enforcement operation, but a continuous tightening of the chain of personal control.

Today, nine years later, the question the Chinese government really needs to answer is extremely simple: Where is Goku?

This cannot be a question that is technically unanswerable for a regime with a vast security, national security, judicial and population management system.

The nine years of silence was the hardest part of the case.