2015-08-04
Rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who has been held on questionable charges since May 2014, in an undated file photo.
AFP
Authorities in the Chinese capital have once more extended the criminal detention of a top rights lawyer, his attorney said, amid an ongoing crackdown on the country's legal profession.
Pu Zhiqiang, 50, was indicted on May 15 for "incitement to racial hatred" and "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" after being held in criminal detention for more than a year.
While the move should mean his case now moves to trial, his lawyers have hit out at repeated delays and extensions to his stay in Beijing's police-run No. 3 Detention Center.
His detention on May 6, 2014 came ahead of an event marking the anniversary of the military crackdown on the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement.
"Normally this would mean his detention has been extended to Aug. 18, but they are likely to extend it still futher," Pu's defense attorney Mo Shaoping told RFA on Tuesday.
He said the state prosecutor's case against Pu turns on "a few tweets" on China's Twitter-like "weibo" services.
"[We are trying to find out] exactly which tweets are supposed to support the charge of picking quarrels and stirring up trouble, and which are supposed to support the incitement to ethnic hatred charge,"
Mo said.
"In all this time, we haven't received a clear answer."
LInked to online posts
Media reports suggest that the “inciting ethnic hatred” is linked to comments posted by Pu on the knife attack at a Kunming railway station in March 2014 on several Sina Weibo accounts.
In support of the "picking quarrels" charge, Pu is said to have “vented his emotions” online to insult Shen Jilan, an elderly legislator who claims never to have voted “no” in parliamentary sessions.
Also said to have been targeted by Pu was Tian Zhenhui, a spokeswoman at a state railway design company blamed for providing a flawed signaling system that caused a high-speed train crash in Zhejiang province, in July 2011.
Before his arrest, Pu was a highly respected and outspoken figure among China's embattled rights attorneys, known for representing high-profile dissidents like artist Ai Weiwei and for his public opposition to the now-abolished "re-education through labor" camps.
In recent weeks, police have detained or interrogated at least 265 lawyers, law firm staff, and associated human right activists.
More than 20 people remain in detention, many of them at undisclosed locations, or have been placed under surveillance or house arrest, according to the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group (CHRLCG).
Libel suit planned
The wife of Li Heping, one of the lawyers detained in the crackdown in Beijing, said she is planning to sue several of China's state-run media organizations for libel after they "violated his rights."
Wang Qiaoling filed a complaint at the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing after her husband had been gone for 25 days with no official notification of his whereabouts.
Chinese Communist Party newspaper The People's Daily, state-run news agency Xinhua, the Procuratorate Daily, online media portals Sina and Sohu are among nine news media named in the complaint.
According to a copy of the lawsuit seen by RFA, the media organizations had "broken professional journalistic codes of ethics," abandoning notions of independence, objective reporting, and rigor.
They had also libeled Li Heping, with serious consequences, it said, demanding the removal of the articles concerned and a public apology.
Wang confirmed the lawsuit but declined to comment, indicating that she is herself under heavy police surveillance.
"It's not convenient for me to give you an interview right now," she said, adding: "The main details are all written in my lawsuit."
