The health of Chinese human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng continues to deteriorate in jail, said his wife Xu Yan after visiting him on Monday. She urged the authorities to grant medical parole immediately, but the lawyer who assisted Yu was not hopeful about getting the green light.

Yu, originally based in Beijing, is serving a four-year prison term in the eastern city of Nanjing, after he was convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” in June last year. He has also been refusing to sign an undertaking as requested by the authorities, as it meant a confession of guilty, Xu told Radio Free Asia.

“Yu’s deformed right arm is in a serious condition that he can’t use chopsticks and write properly,” said Xu in a video she tweeted on Monday. “They took him to a neurologist, but Yu said he should be taken to orthopaedics treatment.” She urged the authorities to grant her husband medical parole or bring him back to Beijing.

The rights attorney’s health condition has drawn widespread concerns since January, after Xu revealed that he had lost four teeth and sustained a severe right-hand injury induced during detention.

Lawyer Xie Yang, who has assisted Yu, said the government will not release Yu on medical parole, given their extremely firm grip on political dissent. The hope that he could get reasonable medical care in prison is also “100% impossible,” Xie added, though the officials may ask Yu to sign the undertaking in exchange for better incarceration conditions.

Xu Yan was allowed to meet Yu via video conferencing since January, after she was barred from visiting him over the last three years of detention. But she was told that her right to visit will be stripped away again starting next month.

“They said it is a Nanjing Prison’s regulation that a visit is allowed every two months. I asked for a written legal provision but they could not show me any. One of them even said that their regulation overrides the law,” Xu said.

The Jiangsu Provincial People’s High Court rejected Yu’s appeal of his four-year prison sentence in December last year.

Yu had represented several individuals who had been arrested and charged under the nationwide 709 crackdown of rights lawyers and activists in 2015. He was arrested himself in January 2018, soon after he had written an open letter criticizing the CCP leadership and calling for constitutional reform.

Click here for Chinese version

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play