Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen has reportedly been moved to a women's prison where conditions are not as harsh. However, there is no new information about Jigme Gyatso, a Buddhist monk who assisted Wangchen on a documentary and who has been arrested several times.
UPDATE from CPJ: Anxiety for jailed Tibetan filmmaker as release nears (24 May 2013)
(CPJ/IFEX) – 22 January 2013 – Some news which appears to be good from China, and some that isn’t: Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen has been moved to a women’s prison where conditions are not as harsh, according to his friends and associates at the Switzerland based group Filming for Tibet. They say that Wangchen has been transferred to the Qinghai Provincial Women’s Prison, the main prison for women in China’s Qinghai province. He had been held at the Xichuan labor camp in Siling, in eastern Tibet.
After months of non-communication with the outside world, Wangchen was able to tell a visitor that he is in better health, even though he spent six months in solitary confinement in Xichuan. Detained in March 2008, he was sentenced to six years in prison for subversion in December, 2009. His request for an appeal of his sentence was denied in January 2010. The use of state security charges are typically used to detain journalists who have run afoul of the Beijing government.
