2015-06-18
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Guangzhou rights lawyer Tang Jingling in an undated photo.
(Photo courtesy of a family member.)
Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong have placed dozens of activists under surveillance after they planned to attend the subversion trial of three prominent rights lawyers on Friday.
Tang Jingling, Wang Qingying, and Yuan Xinting, known as the Guangzhou Three, will stand trial on Friday at the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court for “incitement to subvert state power” after being held in a police detention center for more than a year.
Guangzhou-based political activist Li Biyun was detained by state security police on Wednesday evening after she tried to organize a dinner meeting with fellow activists aiming to go to the court buildings to support the three lawyers on Friday, Li’s sister said.
Li Biyun has been taken back to her hometown outside Guangzhou, while police have left a surveillance team outside her sister’s home to stop her leaving again, her sister Li Caiyun said.
“There are people watching us outside the gates of our building,” Li Caiyun said. “I think it’s because the trial of Tang Jingling opens tomorrow, and they want to prevent her from attending it.”
She said the sisters’ movements weren’t being restricted within their hometown, however.
“We can go where we like, just so long as we don’t go to Guangzhou,” Li Caiyun said.
Tang’s wife Wang Yanfang told RFA that she has been forced to go on an out-of-town “vacation” with state security police ahead of the trial.
“I am already being vacationed,” Wang said. “Some people are under house arrest in their homes, while others have been called in for a ‘chat’.”
“They have called up some people directly, to warn them that they mustn’t go [to the court] tomorrow,” she said.
China’s embattled legal profession ended 2014 with at least seven prominent rights attorneys behind bars, in one of its worst years since its resurgence in the 1980s, rights groups said.
