On 14 May 2025, The Rights Practice, along with 62 press freedom and human rights organisations, issued a joint statement to strongly condemn the Chinese government’s ongoing arbitrary detention of journalist, human rights defender and former lawyer Zhang Zhan, on the 5th anniversary of her arrest.

Zhang is an outspoken journalist, and one of many Chinese citizens who are imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of the press and expression. Zhang Zhan was apprehended by the police on 28 August 2024, only three months after completion of an earlier four-year sentence under the same charge, while travelling to her hometown in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. 

In detention, Zhang Zhan has engaged in intermittent hunger strikes to protest her arbitrary detention. In 2021 she was twice hospitalised due to severe malnutrition and a rapid deterioration of her health. In January 2025, Zhang Zhan again re-started her hunger strike in protest of her second arrest. In response, detention centre personnel have subjected her to forced-feeding through a gastric tube – a practice that may amount to torture or other ill-treatment, in violation of the Convention against Torture ratified by China in 1988.

We urge the Chinese government to immediately and unconditionally release Zhang Zhan and put an end to all acts of harassment towards her as well as to submit its State report to the Committee against Torture (CAT), which is over five years overdue. 

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