To some families, Fathers’ Day is just another day of fighting for their rights.

In Changsha, the capital city of mainland China’s Hunan province, families of the three founders of a Chinese non-governmental organisation are unable to celebrate Fathers’ Day in the traditional way as the trio were charged with state subversion last July and are still under detention.

The families are not allowed to visit the detainees, have no details of the cases and cannot hire lawyers of their own choice.

One of the detainees is Cheng Yuan, who set up the NGO Changsha Funeng with two partners to improve the rights of people with HIV and viral hepatitis. He was most unfortunate to have his four-year-old daughter witness his arrest.

“She knows where her papa is,” said Cheng’s wife, Shi Ming-lei. Shi said the arrest had made a profound impact on her daughter, who had been behaving more maturely since the incident.

Shi said her daughter missed Cheng so much that she kept telling others silly things her father had done, such as hitting a fire hydrant while reversing his car, as if he had never left them. Whenever Shi went to Changsha to try to visit Cheng, the little girl would ask if she was bringing papa back.

“The authorities and the lawyer they have appointed [to represent Cheng] have never told us what the charge is based upon. We cannot even form our own judgment on the matter,” Shi said.

Wu Gejianxiong, 25, who worked for Changsha Funen, initially asked his own father, lawyer Wu Youshui, to represent him right after the young man was arrested in July. The senior Wu was later told that his son preferred to be defended by a lawyer sent by the authorities instead.

“They claimed that I was not close to my son,” Wu said. “If my son didn’t trust me, why would he have called me to represent him in the first place?”

Like Shi, Wu had been requesting in vain to visit his son. “It is written in the law that suspects under detention have the right to communication. People should be able to exercise these rights without the need for us lawyers to fight for them. This is a basic right of a citizen not being realized. In my son’s case, he is deprived of his right to defend and to communicate.”

Meanwhile, human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has found it difficult to bond with his seven-year-old son again after more than four and a half years in jail, during which family visits were not allowed.

“I am figuring out how to understand my son and what children of his age are like,” Wang said after his recent release.

He said father and son were still emotionally close, although the jailing had cast a shadow on his son. “Whenever I leave the house, my son will worry about whether I have been arrested. If I am away for a longer period, he will ask his mother if I have been taken away.”

Wang was jailed for state subversion as part of the 709 nationwide crackdown on legal rights activists that started in July 2015. He was released in April, but was allowed to see his family only later that month.

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