A year ago, the Chinese human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, disappeared. Efforts to find out what has happened to him have been brushed off by the Chinese authorities: ‘Honestly speaking, I don’t know where he is. China has 1.3 billion people and I can’t know all of their whereabouts.’His brother was told last year that he had simply disappeared on a walk. Even though he was named as one of China’s top 10 lawyers by the Ministry of Justice in 2001 for his work defending victims of medical malpractice and farmers whose land had been seized for redevelopment, he fell foul of the government when he began to defend Falun Gong practitioners. After a previous detention in 2006, Gao was allowed to return home after publicly confessing to a number of transgressions. Once out of custody, however, Gao recanted his confession and described the abuse he said he had suffered. He also said his torturers told him he would be killed if he spoke publicly about the matter. Now, after Chinese security agents visited his home at midnight a year ago, he has just disappeared.

The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), like the Law Society, writes letters of intervention to foreign governments, when lawyers are harassed or physically attacked in the course of their work, and we have sent three letters over the years in relation to Gao Zhisheng. An analysis of the letters we have sent over the last three years shows that the most letters (nine) have been sent to China, with Iran next (five). A further 19 countries have been sent one or two letters (only Mexico of those 19 has been sent three.)

The CCBE also awards an annual human rights prize to lawyers who have performed outstandingly in the service of human rights. In 2008, we awarded it to another Chinese human rights lawyer, Li Heping, who was subsequently prevented by the Chinese authorities from travelling to Europe to collect it. He has bravely faced harassment and severe obstacles in his work, and has indeed worked with Gao Zhisheng on some cases.

Lest it be thought that Chinese lawyers are the only ones who suffer such horrible problems, I should state that last year we awarded the prize posthumously to a Russian lawyer, Stanislav Markelov. He defended Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist shot down in Moscow in 2006 while she was investigating atrocities committed during the Chechen wars by the Russian military, and several Chechen nationals tortured during those wars. The CCBE had sent a letter on Markelov’s behalf on 21 January 2009 to president Dmitri Medvedev, when we received information that Markelov had been assassinated by a bullet through his head on 19 January 2009 in the centre of Moscow on his return from a press conference. Markelov was in the process of appealing the decision by the court of Dimiitrovgrad to consider the early release of the Russian colonel Budanov, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2003 for the abduction and murder of a Chechen girl, and who was released on 15 January 2009, just a few days before the assassination.

We are not a human rights organisation. We receive requests to help in a wide variety of circumstances, often heartbreaking. Since we do not have the resources to do much, we restrict ourselves, by and large, to writing letters to governments on behalf of lawyers alone, and delivering our annual human rights award to a lawyer or lawyer’s organisation. Other bars – for instance, the Law Society – undertake similar activities.

The lawyers who suffer are our professional colleagues, performing their duties in impossibly difficult circumstances. Over the last three years, we have sent over 40 letters, sometimes in relation to multiple individuals, only rarely in relation to the same person like Gao Zhisheng. That is about one lawyer a month who is being harassed, persecuted or assassinated in the course of his or her work around the world. I have mentioned before that we should not be too complacent in the UK. Although it is of course extremely rare, solicitors in the UK, in Northern Ireland, have also been assassinated in the past as a result of their professional duties.

I end as I began: where is Gao Zhisheng? All lawyers, in a spirit of solidarity for one of their own colleagues, should be asking the same question. Where is he? Where is he?

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies