Gao Zhisheng, a prominent civil rights lawyer in Beijing, has increasingly turned his attention to cases involving the defence of rights of Chinese workers..."The root causes for the disastrous lack of humanity in labour relations are in the system...the judiciary's inability to break away from the control of the powers that be is what makes it difficult to defend civil rights through the law." In his court defence of workers detained after the April 2004 mass protests at...Stella International shoe factories..., Gao Zhisheng highlighted the problem that in many private-sector factories in China, official trade union branches either simply do not exist or exist in name only....[H]e has not succumbed under the pressure and threats of the authorities.