Liu Yao, a leading Chinese rights lawyer, will lodge an appeal “within two weeks” against a 20-year prison sentence for alleged crimes including extortion and fraud, according to one of his lawyers. 

Mr Liu’s sentence was one of the harshest yet handed down in an extensive crackdown on civil society that has silenced dozens of legal, labour and ethnic minority activists over the past five years. 

Three years ago Ilham Tohti, an advocate for China’s Muslim Uighur community, was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly advocating independence for China’s north-west region of Xinjiang. In August 2016 Zhou Shifeng, who headed a Beijing law firm at the centre of a crackdown against rights lawyers, received a seven-year sentence for alleged subversion against the state.