The present report updates Amnesty International’s Breaking the law: Crackdown on human rights lawyers and legal activists in China (ASA 17/042/2009) published in 2009. The current report documents how the government exerts control over lawyers in three ways: first, by trying to rein in their behaviour through increasing demands to conform to party ideology; second, by using administrative procedures to discipline and stop lawyers and others who have taken on human rights cases; and third, by carrying out violent acts, illegal under China’s own laws, against people who persist when all other forms of pressure on them have failed to end their human rights activism. Amnesty International is concerned at the influence that the Chinese Communist Party is seeking over lawyers, in particular its insistence on placing the “defence of socialism” and the primacy of the Communist Party’s mission above the independence of lawyers in the defence of their clients’ lawful rights. In that context, Amnesty refers to the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers.