Most prominent cases in China by lawyers now in custody

BEIJING (AP) — Trials started this week of Chinese lawyers and legal rights activists who were detained in July last year and charged with subversion for their attempts to bring attention to abuses and demand government accountability.

Fengrui also represented members of the Falun Gong meditation sect that the government has relentlessly suppressed since banning it as an "evil cult" in 1999.

Group leaders have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms and ordinary followers locked up as threats to social order.

Fengrui also represented Ilham Tohti, an outspoken scholar from the Uighur minority group who was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred, advocating violence and instigating terror through his classroom teaching and a website on Uighur issues.

Blind since childhood, Chen Guangcheng obtained a working knowledge of the law and embarked on a career of activism on behalf of the disabled and fellow villagers in Shandong province.

After representing unpopular causes such as Falun Gong and Christians worshipping outside the official church, Gao was given a suspended sentence for subversion in 2006, but was repeatedly detained for long periods and returned to prison in 2011.

Since his release in 2014, he has been living under near-constant surveillance by Chinese authorities, while his family has been living in the U.S. since fleeing there in 2009.