2015-01-20
.jpg)
Pu Zhiqiang (front right) attends a seminar about the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, May 3, 2014.
Photo courtesy of CHRD
China’s embattled legal profession ended last year with at least seven prominent rights attorneys behind bars, in one of its worst years since its renaissance in the 1980s, an overseas rights group said in a recent article.
The Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) group, which translates and collates details of human rights cases from Chinese rights groups, cited the case of prominent lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who turned 50 in jail this month, and who has been held for more than six months as prosecutors request further evidence to support subversion charges against him.
“The past year has been distinctly bad for a band of crusading lawyers, who for the past decade or so, since their movement first emerged, have described their mission as ‘weiquan,’ or ‘safeguarding rights,'” CHRD researcher Frances Eve wrote in a commentary article emailed to RFA.
It said the ranks of human rights lawyers operating in mainland China have grown from just a handful to more than 200.
But since 2003, the authorities have begun detaining attorneys who engage in this sort of work, it said.
“Since President Xi Jinping came to power, the government’s war on rights lawyers has escalated,” Eve wrote.
At least nine prominent lawyers either are currently facing criminal charges or began serving prison sentences in 2014, CHRD said, naming Ding Jiaxi, Pu Zhiqiang, Qu Zhenhong, Tang Jingling, Xia Lin, Xu Zhiyong, and Yu Wensheng, as well as Chang Boyang and Ji Laisong, both released on bail awaiting trial after months in detention.
The unprecedented scale of criminal prosecution against rights lawyers is at odds with pledges to “govern the country by law,” which was the declared theme of China’s ruling Communist Party’s Fourth Plenum leadership gathering in October, the group said.
Pu Zhiqiang
Pu, a former activist in the 1989 pro-democracy movement, was detained last May, initially on charges of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” and “illegally obtaining personal information.”
But police later added the more serious charges of “inciting separatism” and “incitement to subvert state power,” while Beijing-based rights lawyer Mo Shaoping, who heads Pu’s defense team, has repeatedly accused the authorities of “deliberate delays” to the case.
“The time period allotment for reinvestigation of the Pu Zhiqiang case is now up, and his lawyers have been in touch with the prosecution service, who [initially] said the police hadn’t yet sent across the relevant files,” Mo told RFA on Tuesday.
“Then lawyer Shang Baojun contacted the procuratorate again, and the reply came back that they had sent the case files, and that they wanted us to go and view them in the next few days,” Mo said.
He said much of the evidence against Pu consists of “more than 30” tweets to the popular Twitter-like service Sina Weibo.
