Tibetan blogger Lobsang Jamyang, also known as Lomig, is serving a sentence of seven years and six months on charges of leaking state secrets. Police arrested Jamyang in April 2015 and held him for 11 months before trial.
Ngaba county police arrested Jamyang in Sichuan province on April 17, 2015. In May 2016, the Wenchuan People’s Court in Sichuan sentenced him to seven years and six months in prison in a secret trial after he was convicted of "leaking state secrets," a representative of the India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy told CPJ.
People familiar with Jamyang’s case told the center that local authorities held him for more than a year without informing his family of his whereabouts and that he was beaten and tortured during this time. That article did not specify how he was allegedly tortured, and CPJ could not independently verify the information.
According to the website Tibet Express, Tibetan writers believed that Jamyang’s conviction was related to his articles critical of the Chinese government’s policies in Tibet, including on environmental degradation, restrictions on speech, and the causes of self-immolations and other protests in 2008. CPJ was unable to determine whether the articles were cited during his closed trial.
As well as writing for Tibetan websites such as Choeme, Sengdor and the blog Tsongon, Jamyang published a book titled "Surge of Yellow Mist," according to Tibet Express.
Jamyang was being held at Mianyang Prison in Sichuan province as of 2017, the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy told CPJ via email. After visiting him in 2016, Jamyang’s brother told the center that the writer was in poor health, but did not provide further details.
CPJ called the Mianyang Security Bureau in late 2019 for comment, but no one answered. In late 2021, CPJ called the bureau again, but its phone number was out of service. As of September 2021, CPJ could not determine the state of Jamyang’s health.