Human rights attorney Teng Biao has now emigrated from China. But in 2011, as the ABA Journal reported in a February 2015 feature, Teng was seized by the Chinese authorities and subjected to 70 days of torture and solitary confinement.

“When I was kidnapped and detained and tortured, I was told that if I don’t quit I will be put into prison [for] five years or 10 years,” Teng told the ABA Journal. “Their purpose was to get me to stop. But every time I was released I just felt I had to continue. I feel it is my responsibility to struggle for human rights. I can’t stop, [although] my work becomes more and more dangerous.”

Since leaving China, Teng has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and at New York University Law School’s US-Asia Law Institute. After the mass arrests in July 2015, Teng wrote a column for the Washington Post.

“The arrests of the past week mark an important historical moment in China’s legal profession,” Teng wrote. “It’s likely that, just as in the past, those who were disappeared are being tortured. But this crackdown won’t silence the rights lawyers, and it won’t stop the march toward human rights and dignity in China. Rights lawyers will rise from the ashes with an even deeper sense of their historical responsibility.”

• Related feature: “China’s latest crackdown on lawyers is unprecedented, human rights monitors say”