In June, the National Intelligence Law was adopted and entered into force. These laws were part of a national security legal architecture introduced in 2014 − which also included the Anti-espionage Law, Criminal Law Amendment (9), National Security Law, Anti-terrorism Law and Cyber Security Law − and presented serious threats to the protection of human rights. The National Intelligence Law used similarly vague and overbroad concepts of national security, and granted effectively unchecked powers to national intelligence institutions with unclear roles and responsibilities. All lacked safeguards to protect against arbitrary detention and to protect the right to privacy, freedom of expression and other human rights.1 The draft Supervision Law, which opened for consultation in November, would, if enacted as is, legalize a new form of arbitrary detention, named liuzhi, and create an extrajudicial system with far-reaching powers with significant potential to infringe human rights.2 The authorities continued to use “residential surveillance in a designated location”, a form of secret incommunicado detention that allowed the police to hold individuals for up to six months outside the formal detention system, without access to legal counsel of their choice, their families or others, and placed suspects at risk of torture and other ill-treatment. This form of detention was used to curb the activities of human rights defenders, including lawyers, activists and religious practitioners. HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS On 13 July, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo died in custody from liver cancer. The authorities had refused a request from Liu Xiaobo and his family that he travel abroad to receive medical treatment.3 At the end of the year, his wife Liu Xia remained under surveillance and illegal “house arrest” which had continued since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. At least 10 activists were detained for holding memorials for him. 126 In November, writer and government critic Yang Tongyan, who had spent nearly half his life in detention, died shortly after his release on medical parole. Among the nearly 250 targeted individuals who were questioned or detained by state security agents following the unprecedented government crackdown on human rights lawyers and other activists that started in July 2015, nine were convicted of “subverting state power”, “inciting subversion of state power” or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. Three people were given suspended sentences and one “exempted from criminal punishment” while remaining under surveillance and five remained imprisoned. In April, Beijing lawyer Li Heping, detained since the beginning of the crackdown, was given a three-year suspended prison sentence for “subverting state power”. He claimed that he was tortured during pre-trial detention, including being force-fed medicine. Yin Xu’an was sentenced in May to three and a half years’ imprisonment. Wang Fang was sentenced in July to three years’ imprisonment. Beijing lawyer Jiang Tianyong, who went missing in November 2016 and “confessed” at a trial in August to fabricating the torture account of lawyer Xie Yang by Chinese police and attending overseas workshops to discuss changing China’s political system, was sentenced in November to two years’ imprisonment for “inciting subversion of state power”. Hu Shigen and Zhou Shifeng, convicted in 2016, remained imprisoned. Beijing human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, held in incommunicado detention since the beginning of the crackdown, was still awaiting trial at the end of the year, charged with “subverting state power”. In January, an interview transcript with Xie Yang was published in which he said he faced torture and other ill-treatment during detention. Xie Yang was released on bail without a verdict in May after his trial. On 26 December, the court announced his conviction on the charge of “inciting subversion of state power” but ruled that he was “exempt from criminal punishment”. He remained under surveillance. Amnesty International Report 2017/18