Ye Haiyan
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Activist Ye Haiyan continues 'dirty battle' for sex workers' rights
I’ve been engaged in this activism for nine years, what I’m happiest about has been to see the change in attitude in civil society. But the government’s attitude in this regard is still unchanged, the issue of sex workers’ rights is still unresolved.
Ye Haiyan is an advocate for the rights of sex workers and people living with HIV/AIDS. She has been consistently targeted over the past number of years because of her work. In 2005 she began a website to advocate on behalf of sex workers and the following year she established a women's rights Centre in Wuhan province. In 2010 she organised a protest calling for an end to discrimination against sex workers and around this time she also began to be regularly questioned by police. In 2011 she set up a new NGO in Guangxi and in January 2012 she worked as a prostitute for a day and blogged about it afterwards in order to highlight the difficulties that sex workers face. In May of 2012 her NGO office in Guangxi was raided by eight plainclothes men who also reportedly attacked her. The human rights defender said after the attack that she presumed the men had been sent by the local government.
Chinese HRDs face intimidation, harassment, house arrest, abductions, torture and imprisonment. They also work under very restrictive legislation, including laws which criminalize all unauthorized demonstrations and require government sponsorship for NGO registration, which is refused to any organisation touching on human rights issues. Widescale investigations into NGOs with links to overseas organisations took place in 2014 and 2015 resulting in harassment, detentions and forced closures.
