3 November 2026
Gonmo Kyi, sister of imprisoned Tibetan businessman Dorje Tashi, has made a further bold protest in Lhasa as her brother continues to be held incommunicado and without access to his family and lawyers.
Gonmo Kyi staged a sit-in outside the Higher People’s Court in Lhasa on Monday (26 October), calling for a fair trial for her brother, who was sentenced to life in 2008 and severely tortured in a black jail. Gonmo Kyi (also spelt Gonpo Kyi) has been campaigning for her brother’s release for more than three years, highlighting years of systematic denial of visitation rights for the family and his lawyer, contravening Chinese regulations. Gonmo Kyi says that she has not even been allowed to write a letter to 52-year old Dorje Tashi, who was among Tibet’s most prominent entrepreneurs and a Communist Party member before his arrest.
Several Chinese lawyers have now worked on Dorje Tashi’s case, hired by different family members including his siblings and recently by his wife, and the authorities have consistently refused access to him, compounding Dorje Tashi’s isolation in prison and heightening fears for his welfare and survival.
In a video received by Tibet Watch, a distressed Gonmo Kyi can be seen last week holding up a petition asking that Dorje Tashi’s lawyer be allowed to review his complete case files, and that his case be retried fairly to overturn his unjust sentence. At the bottom of the petition, she has written, “Dorje Tashi is innocent.” Gonmo Kyi is also holding a portrait of Xi Jinping, signalling that she is not making a political protest but an appeal to the central authorities to correct a specific injustice by regional officials.
Dorje Tashi (Chinese transliteration: Duoji Zhaxi), formerly one of Tibet’s super elite who had received awards from the Chinese Communist Party, was imprisoned and interrogated initially in a ‘black jail’ due to charges that were reportedly fabricated against him and his brother by at least one top official. Despite expert Chinese legal opinions finding the evidence insufficient to support fraud charges or a life sentence, all appeals have been rejected.
Following his detention during the crackdown after the 2008 Lhasa unrest, he endured torture so severe that prison guards reportedly wept and attempted to shield him from interrogators sent from Beijing, who appeared to be from a specialist team or unit of the feared ‘Guobao’ or secret police.
His sister Gonmo Kyi previously protested in June, saying that as the Lhasa court had not handled the case fairly, she was obliged to continue protesting. In the earlier video received by Tibet Watch, she said: “There is nothing else I can do except keep protesting. When officers conduct unjust trials, ordinary people suffer. The officers act as if they are above the law, taking bribes and engaging in corruption, playing games with the state’s laws and mocking its people. If true justice exists, the officers who framed an innocent person must be punished. They never follow the law or deliver justice.”
Gonmo Kyi has been repeatedly detained, beaten – once breaking her arm – and dragged away from protesting by police in Lhasa. In August last year she was severely injured after jumping from the second floor of the family’s hotel in Lhasa while being detained by local police.
One of Dorje Tashi’s lawyers Wang Fei is also being prevented from having direct contact with Dorje Tashi, who has been beaten and injured by other inmates at least twice inside Drapchi (Tibet Autonomous Region) prison where he is held. In a phone call to the prison early in October, according to Tibet Watch sources, the lawyer confronted an official, saying: “You’re going too far. You’ve restricted family visits for years, leaving them with no recourse. […] If you protected their visitation rights according to the law, if you protected lawyers’ visitation rights according to the law, do you think they would have a problem with you? Do you even want to enforce the laws of the People’s Republic of China? Do you even belong to the territory of the People’s Republic of China?” When the official replies that it is a Chinese Communist Party prison, the lawyer replied that in this case, the prison should enforce the laws of the Party leadership.
According to new information received by Tibet Watch, another Chinese lawyer hired by Dorje Tashi’s wife has travelled to Lhasa more than three times to raise the matter with officials, but his wife and children have still not been given permission to meet him.
In April last year, prison officials refused to allow Dorje Tashi’s brother Dorje Tsetan, and Chinese lawyer Wang Fei to visit, citing an unexplained “violation of prison rules.” The visit had been properly scheduled over a month in advance with all required documentation, apparently contravening Chinese regulations that require authorities to arrange meetings promptly or provide clear explanations within 48 hours for delays. Then this July, Dorje Tashi’s brother Dorje Tsetan, who himself served six years in prison in connection with his brother’s case, came to the entrance of the prison to request access but was blocked from seeing his brother. He described the repeated denial of access over the last six years as “unbearable.”
Gonmo Kyi has previously staged sit-ins in front of the People’s Court in Lhasa and was severely beaten by police in April 2024 following solo protests in front of the Tibet Higher People’s Court, the same location she protested this week, where she called for a retrial.
In the latest video, showing the couple surrounded by police officers, Gonmo Kyi’s husband, Choekyong, stands beside her and can be heard saying: “We have always asked the court to address our two demands in accordance with state law, but the court has never acted according to the law.” When police try to stop him from filming, he insists that it is legal to do so, saying: “This court has never conducted a fair trial according to the state’s law” and that if they had, it would not have been needed to stage the sit-in.
Tibet Watch calls on international governments to:
- Raise immediate concern about Gonmo Kyi’s welfare and safety. As a matter of urgency, Dorje Tashi’s family should be allowed to visit him, consistent with Chinese regulations.
- Press the government of China and regional authorities in Tibet to release Dorje Tashi and investigate his case.
Dorje Tashi’s current condition in prison remains unknown due to the systematic denial of access to family members and legal representatives. An investigation into his case should encompass the following:
- Dorje Tashi was tortured during interrogations in 2008 and was subsequently subjected to inhumane, cruel and degrading treatment while in custody, both in detention centres and in prison;
- A number of senior officials instigated officials to carry out the detention, investigation, prosecution and conviction with a view to ensuring imprisonment of the defendants, as well as interfering in subsequent appeals and investigations into the case;
- Police investigating the cases tampered with at least one witness, detaining him in order to get more convenient testimony;
- The judges in the case convicted Dorje Tashi for loan fraud despite the reported facts that the loan was repaid in full, that the bank did not pursue any case against Dorje Tashi, that Dorje Tashi was as he claimed the legal owner of company presented as collateral for the loan, and that even if the loan collateral had been fabricated the case should in law have been tried as a lesser offence of embezzlement not fraud;
- The judges in the case imposed a life sentence in this case despite having imposed a 15-year sentence four months earlier on two persons convicted for the same offence in a case involving an amount 40 times greater than that in Dorje Tashi’s case;
- Relatives of the prisoner have not been allowed to visit him in recent years.
