2014-12-17
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Photo courtesy of Wang Yu’s microblog
Authorities in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang on Wednesday put on trial four members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, which the ruling Chinese Communist Party has designated an “evil cult,” amid tight security that also targeted their defense lawyers.
Shi Mengwen, Meng Fanli, Wang Yanxin and Li Guifang stood trial at a court in Heilongjiang’s Jiansanjiang city, close to the Russian border, for “using an evil cult to undermine law enforcement,” defense attorney Wang Yu told RFA.
But the trial was dogged by tight security measures and procedural issues all day, with Wang’s journey to the courtroom fraught with delays and repeated security checks, she said.
“There were several checkpoints at which they checked our ID cards, but this was completely unnecessary,” Wang said. “They did it deliberately, just to make the lawyers’ job more difficult.”
“Perhaps they wanted to prevent the lawyers from getting to the courtroom at all, or perhaps they wanted to humiliate us.”
“But the biggest problem with the trial was that when the lawyers brought up some illegal procedures, they were ignored,” Wang said.
Security around the courtroom was very tight, with police reinforcements drawn from the countryside around Jiansanjiang guarding the area, eyewitnesses said.
Some of the defendants’ supporters who tried to attend the trial were detained, one of them told RFA.
“They didn’t have enough police officers, so they brought in police from surrounding farm areas,” said Pan Shurong, a former inmate of a Jiansanjiang unofficial detention center, or “black jail.”
“It’s not just police vehicles there; there are a lot of civilian vehicles including sedans and minibuses, and the police are hiding in those,” she said.
“They are patrolling the streets, checking ID cards; if a person’s ID card isn’t on the list, then they detain them,” Pan said, adding that she had seen two women detained near the court building.
“There were about six or seven police, and they treated them very roughly, shoving them into a police car,” she said. “They were cruel.”
Pan said she had tried to attend the trial without success.
“All of the intersections have checkpoints right now … and traffic can’t get through; they’re all sealed off,” Pan said, speaking from an upstairs window near the court buildings.
“The police are driving minibuses around, detaining people … there are patrols driving around,” she said.
