By Bill Smith Jan 15, 2010, 11:20 GMT
Beijing - Self-taught lawyer Gao Zhisheng was once hailed by the Chinese government as one of the nation's top 10 attorneys.
But his growing reputation and confidence engendered a fearlessness that eventually brought him into direct conflict with the ruling Communist Party.
His persecution by China's judicial authorities made him a cause celebre for rights activists inside and outside China, bringing his name to the attention of US President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W Bush, and earning him a nomination for the 2008 Nobel Prize for Peace.
Police have told his relatives that he disappeared while he was taking a walk in September, rights groups said on Friday.
Gao's brother, Gao Zhiyi, was told by a Beijing police officer who detained the laywer in February that he 'got lost and went missing while out on a walk' on September 25, US-based China Aid said in a statement posted on its website.
A global petition for Gao's release, launched by two US rights groups on the website www.freegao.com, had registered more than 123,000 online supporters by Friday.
Gao, 44, took on highly sensitive cases despite threats, violence and imprisonment by the authorities.
The government closed his Beijing-based Shengzhi law firm in 2005 after he called via the internet for an end to the persecution of members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement who were sent to a re-education camp.
It tried to silence him by passing a three-year suspended prison sentence for subversion at a closed trial in December 2006.
The court convicted him of publishing seditious articles on foreign websites, including open letters on President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao as well as an article entitled 'The regime that never stopped killing people.'
State prosecutors said that Gao had spread 'rumours about China's current government and social system, conspiring to topple the regime.'
Yet shortly after his arrest in August 2006, the government's official Xinhua news agency again acknowledged that 'as one of the top 10 Chinese lawyers, Gao has long been an expert in the legal aid field.'
Known to friends as a physically large and assertive man, Gao was born to a family of seven children in a rural area of the north-western province of Shaanxi.
The outspoken lawyer had joined the Communist Party as a young man while he served in the People's Liberation Army in China's central Asian region of Xinjiang.
A few years after leaving the army, he began studying law in the early 1990s and worked as a lawyer in Xinjiang until he moved to Beijing in 2000.
In recent years, Gao often called China's one-party rulers 'barbaric' and likened them to 'mafia bosses.'
He had campaigned on behalf of protesting farmers, dissidents, Christians, AIDS activists and fellow rights lawyers.
An English translation of his book, A China More Just, was published in 2007.
In an open letter before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Gao asked the US Congress to 'pay attention to the ongoing human rights disaster in China.'
'I ask to you to seriously consider the true value of morality, justice, and humanity, as well as to what extent such values are undermined in China,' Gao wrote.
'We don't support, nor pretend to support Olympic Games that is used as a political tool,' he said, apparently speaking for himself and other Chinese rights activists.
'Nor can we support or pretend to support Olympic Games that has no consideration for human conscience, justice and morality,' he said.
Gao also came into conflict with police and state security through public complaints about constant surveillance and harassment in recent years.
He wrote a blog in 2005 about how the police constantly shadowed him, his wife and daughter; intimidated petitioners who asked Gao for advice; and put pressure on his landlord.
In his most recent arrest, Gao was seized from his family home in Shaanxi last February, shortly after his wife and children had completed a dramatic escape to the United States.
His wife said witnesses in Shaanxi reported seeing Gao there last summer, accompanied by a dozen police officers.
Gao's brother said he spoke to him in early September, hearing only a quick 'I'm ok' before the line went dead.
'Even if Gao Zhisheng had committed a terrible crime, his family would still have the right to know what had happened to him,' Gao Zhiyi told US-based Radio Free Asia in November.
'For every question, there are three unknowns. No-one knows anything,' Gao Zhiyi said. 'They won't talk to us and they won't meet with us,' he said of the authorities.
Your Talkback on this Story