Tear for China’s Children – A Study of Democratic Deficit, Human Rights Violations and Militarism in the People's Republic of China

In June 2019, human rights lawyer, Ji Sizun, received the news that he had won a prestigious human rights distinction, the Cao Shunli Memorial Award, in honour of the veteran Chinese activist who died in 2014 in police custody, after being denied needed medical treatment for months. It would be a little more than one month until he himself died while under the watch of state security. Ji, one of China's most prominent "barefoot lawyers", self-taught legal advocates, spent most of the last decade in prison in his native Fujian province. He was in a semi-comatose state when he finished his most recent sentence of four and a half years in April 2019; and was immediately sent to a hospital. On 10 July 2019, two months after leaving prison, Ji, 69, died of unknown causes. He joins a growing list of imprisoned political activists who have died after being denied adequate medical treatment. The author's opinion: "For human rights defenders in China, prison sentences are increasingly turning into death sentences."