MAY 15, 2015
Pu Zhiqiang in 2012. Credit Andy Wong/Associated Press
HONG KONG — One of China’s best-known human rights lawyers, Pu Zhiqiang, will stand trial in Beijing on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and picking quarrels, prosecutors said on Friday. Their announcement came just over a year after the police detained Mr. Pu, making him one of the most prominent targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s vigorous campaign against dissent.
The United States State Department recently called for Mr. Pu’s release, and Secretary of State John Kerry is due to arrive in Beijing on Saturday for talks. But China’s party-run legal system rarely abandons cases against politically contentious figures like Mr. Pu, and his trial is likely to end with a guilty verdict and a prison sentence.
A branch of the Beijing Municipal People’s Procuratorate, or prosecutor’s office, said in an announcement online that Mr. Pu would be tried for “inciting ethnic hatred” and for “picking quarrels and provoking incidents” in a series of comments he had made on the Internet.
“He brazenly insulted others, and the circumstances were vile and destructive to social order,” the prosecutors said in the announcement. “He should be pursued for criminal culpability under the law.”
Mr. Pu and his supporters have maintained that the case is a baseless, politically motivated attack on a lawyer who long irked officials by challenging them in court and online. His lawyers said Mr. Pu adamantly rejected the charges.
“Of course, he’ll maintain that he’s innocent and will continue to defend himself,” Shang Baojun, one of Mr. Pu’s two lawyers, said by telephone.
The prosecutors’ announcement did not give a date for Mr. Pu’s trial; a court will announce it later. Mr. Shang said that a trial could be two or three months away, and that he would meet with Mr. Pu next week after obtaining a copy of the indictment.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has sought to stamp out sources of potential opposition. Hundreds of rights advocates, journalists, civic association leaders and aggrieved citizens have been detained, and sometimes prosecuted and imprisoned.
But few are as well known as Mr. Pu, a burly 50-year-old with a crew cut, a booming voice and a mocking sense of humor. That irreverence may prove to be his legal downfall.
The prosecutors did not lay out specific evidence against Mr. Pu in their statement on Friday, but his lawyers had earlier confirmed that the case was built around a succession of scathing comments he had made on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblog service similar to Twitter. (Mr. Pu said he could not recall making some of the comments.)
Those remarks included criticisms of the Chinese government’s policies toward the Uighur ethnic minority in Xinjiang, a region of western China gripped by tension and violence. His lawyers said those criticisms appeared to be the basis for charging him with inciting ethnic hatred.
“If you say Xinjiang belongs to China, then don’t treat it as a colony,” Mr. Pu wrote in May 2014. “Don’t act as conquerors and plunderers, striking out against any and all before and after, turning them into the enemy.”
Mr. Pu was detained in May of last year after attending a small gathering to commemorate the people killed in June 1989, when armed troops converged on Tiananmen Square in Beijing to crush pro-democracy protests. In 1989, Mr. Pu was a graduate student who supported the protests.
Mr. Pu’s other defense lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said in a telephone interview that each of the charges against Mr. Pu could result in a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, although the courts were unlikely to impose such long sentences. Mr. Shang said the two charges against Mr. Pu could result in a prison sentence of eight years or less, if he is convicted.
