Sonam Gonpo (索南公保; also rendered 索南贡波, “Solnam Gonpo”), a Tibetan, born around 1985, is a former cook at Thankyi Primary School in Tongxiao township, Nyarong County (Chinese: 新龙县 Xinlong), Kandze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 17, 2009, and is listed among the life-imprisonment political prisoners in the Rights Defense Network’s August 31, 2026 monthly report.
The 2009 case
On February 28, 2009, the Tangkyi (Tongxiao) township government office was attacked: slogans and handbills described as “inciting splitting the nation” were posted, and the office building was set on fire, destroying its fixtures, with reported losses exceeding 200,000 yuan. This account comes from the Ganzi Daily (March 18, 2009), quoted in translation in an International Campaign for Tibet report. Sonam Gonpo was detained at dawn on March 11, 2009, after a “criminal investigation,” and Human Rights Watch records that he was arrested for alleged involvement in the attack on the government building.
He was convicted of “inciting separatism” and “disturbing social order” in a secret, summary trial with no legal representation; the families were notified only after sentencing, according to the International Campaign for Tibet and the Central Tibetan Administration’s Tibetan Parliament in Exile. On November 17, 2009, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. His co-defendants received a suspended death sentence (Pema Yeshi, 白玛益西, a 28-year-old farmer) and sixteen years (Tsewang Gyatso, 重文江措, a 32-year-old elementary-school cook).
Advocacy and current status
Human Rights Watch’s May 21, 2019 compilation “China: Free Tibetans Unjustly Imprisoned” called for the release of Sonam Gonpo and other arbitrarily imprisoned Tibetans, recording that he was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 17, 2009. The Tibetan Parliament in Exile condemned the sentences in a March 1, 2010 press release.
The Rights Defense Network / 维权网 monthly report of August 31, 2026 (Issue 131) lists 索南公保（藏） among its nineteen life-imprisonment political prisoners. Whether he remains in the same facility, his medical condition, and any post-2026 change in status are unknown and are not inferred here.
A note on identity
This profile must not be conflated with a different man of the same phonetic name: Sonam Gonpo (索朗贡布), a monk of Wonpo Monastery who was sentenced on September 11, 2013 to four years in prison for “desecration of the national flag” and was released on March 12, 2016. Same sound, different person, different county, different case.
Further reading
The full documented source record for Sonam Gonpo is preserved in a companion media archive, which gathers the case chronology, source list, identity exclusion, and evidentiary limitations in one place.