Niu Yan (牛艳)
Niu Yan (牛艳), born 1951, is a resident of Yezhugou Township, Huanren County, Benxi City, Liaoning Province, and a Falun Gong practitioner who began practicing in 1998, according to the Falun Gong-run outlet Minghui and the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) Prisoners of Conscience database. She is also recorded under the alternate character forms 牛彦 and 牛燕.
Minghui reports that she was repeatedly detained after 1999 for her practice: a fifteen-day detention in late 1999 after a petition trip to Beijing; a one-year term at the Masanjia labor camp in 2000; a seven-year prison sentence handed down by the Xinbin County court in 2002, served at the Liaoning Provincial Women’s Prison; and a three-and-a-half-year sentence in 2015 following a 2014 demonstration at Tiananmen Square — totaling eleven and a half years of prior detention, during which, Minghui reports, she was subjected to ill-treatment that has not been independently corroborated.
In March 2023 she was detained in Huanren County while distributing Falun Gong materials and was held at the Benxi Detention Center. The CHRD database records that the Xihu District court in Benxi sentenced her to three years and six months in 2024, with the term running to September 8, 2026. The charge and the facility where she served the sentence are not specified in the available sources. The sentence term ended on September 8, 2026; whether she has been released is not documented, and her current status is unknown.
These details come from Minghui and the CHRD database and have not been independently corroborated by non-advocacy sources; Minghui’s characterizations of the proceedings are presented as reported.