Teng Biao

Teng Biao is a Visiting Scholar at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University, where his research is focused on the rights defense movement in China. Teng previously was a Lecturer at China University of Political Science and Law and the Director of China Against the Death Penalty in Beijing. In 2007, he was a visiting scholar at Yale Law School and, before that, a visiting scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Teng has also been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School. In 2003, he was one of the “Three Doctors of Law” who complained to the National People’s Congress about unconstitutional detentions of internal migrants in the widely known Sun Zhigang case. Since then, Teng has provided counsel in numerous other human rights cases, including those of rural rights advocate Chen Guangcheng, rights defender Hu Jia, the religious freedom case of Wang Bo, and numerous death penalty cases. He has also co-founded two groups that have combined research with work on human rights cases: Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng) and China Against the Death Penalty. Teng was awarded the Prize for Outstanding Democracy Activist (China Democracy Education Foundation, 2011) and the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic (2007).