2015-08-20
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China’s feminist five — (clockwise from top left) Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting and Wang Man — were released on April 14, 2015.
EyePress News
A defense attorney for one of the five Chinese feminists detained as they organized an anti-sexual harassment even for International Women’s Day has been prevented from leaving the country, he told RFA on Thursday.
Liang Xiaojun, who represented women’s rights activist Wu Rongrong after her detention alongside four fellow activists, was turned away as he tried to cross the border to board a plane to study in the United States.
“I, my wife and our child were about to go through immigration, and we were standing at the line, and they looked at my passport, and called somebody over,” Liang said after returning from Beijing’s International Airport. “That person took us to one side and said he had a few things to ask us.”
“They had us wait awhile to one side, and they made a phone call to ask about it,” he said.
Liang said he and his family waited there for around 20 minutes.
“The border police told us they had received notification from the Beijing police department that I was to be prevented from leaving the country on the grounds that it would harm national security,” Liang said.
Liang said he couldn’t imagine what he might have done to “endanger national security.”
“He was just following orders,” he said. “There was nothing in writing; it was a verbal notification.”
However, Liang wrote on social media that he had made “mental preparations” for being stopped.
Liang and the rest of the feminists’ defense team had previously called for all remaining charges against the feminist five — Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Wei Tingting, Wang Man, and Zheng Churan — who were detained ahead of International Women’s Day and later released on “bail.”
Liang is the latest in a line of human rights lawyers to be prevented from leaving the country since the ruling Chinese Communist Party began targeting the country’s embattled legal profession in a nationwide police operation on July 9-10.
“Following the … crackdown, at least five lawyers and one child have been restricted from leaving the country on grounds of ‘endangering national security,'” the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group (CHRLCG) said in a statement on its website.
Liang said the charge of endangering national security is increasingly being used against the profession by police in recent weeks.
“Whether they are detaining lawyers or preventing them from leaving the country, they use the same charge,” he said. “The details differ in each case, so some people have restrictions on their freedom, while some are prevented from leaving China.”
But Liang said the move was a misuse of state power.
“This is an abuse of the law, and a violation of citizens’ rights,” he said.
