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CHINA NEWS SECTION: Human Rights

• China Human Rights Lawyers Effectively Disbarred ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary

  

  Jane Macartney reports for the Times Online:

  Chinese authorities effectively disbarred some of the country’s leading civil rights lawyers yesterday, dealing a blow to a group than has done more to hold the Government to account than any other in recent years.

  The lawyers described the move as part of a carefully orchestrated government campaign to prevent them from taking on controversial or high-profile cases. They have faced intimidation, threats and violence in the past to deter them from doing so.

  The timing of the move is no coincidence. The 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown falls on Thursday and the Government is eager to suppress dissenting voices.

  From Reuters:

  Chinese lawyers taking on contentious human rights cases face limbo from Sunday after authorities did not approve an annual registration step the lawyers said was being used to stifle their work.

  [...]The 18 or so lawyers whose work may be stymied belong to a loose network of advocates who have challenged the government over deaths in prison and labour-reeducation camps, farmers stripped of their land, children sickened by toxic milk powder and other sensitive cases.

  The annual registration required by government rules is usually a routine step that must be completed by May 31. But the lawyers facing effective disbarment said they appear to have been punished for taking on contentious clients, including members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual sect.

  The U.S. has responded with criticism.  From AP via Taiwan News:

  The United State says it is “deeply disturbed” by reports that China has refused to renew the licenses of human rights lawyers.

  State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters Friday that the United States is urging “that rights lawyers in China be given full scope to practice law.”

  » Read more
  • May 31, 2009 6:04 PM

• Hong Kong Protest over Tiananmen

  

  Several thousand protesters marched in Hong Kong today in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 military crackdown on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.  This BBC report also has video of interviews with protest participants:

  Thousands have marched in Hong Kong to mark the forthcoming 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen killings, in one of the few such events on Chinese soil.

  [...]Many at the protest wore black and white, to symbolise mourning.

  Police said at least 4,700 people had gathered. Tens of thousands more are expected to attend a candlelit vigil on Thursday.

  More details of demonstrator demands from Voice of America:

  Protesters urged the government in Beijing to reverse its verdict condemning the Tiananmen protests as a counterrevolutionary riot.

  They called for justice for the victims of the Chinese government’s crackdown on June 3rd and 4th in which hundreds and possibly thousands of students and workers were killed on the streets of the Chinese capital.

  The Hong Kong demonstrators were joined by Tiananmen protest leader Xiong Yan, who lives in exile in the United States.

  Xiong Yan’s presence in Hong Kong is a surprise.  From IOL:

  Xiong, who was put on a list of the authorities’ 21 “most-wanted” student protesters after the occupation of Tiananmen was broken up, spent two years in jail before being smuggled to the US via Hong Kong.

  His entry was unexpected because of China’s sensitive attitude to any criticism of the crackdown.

  “I was very surprised as I have tried many, many times to come,” said Xiong, who arrived Saturday night, the first time he had set foot on Chinese soil in 17 years.

  » Read more
  • May 31, 2009 2:50 PM

• Andrew Roche: A Night With China’s Secret Police in 1989

  

  From the Reuters:

  “When men speak of the future, the gods laugh,” runs an old Chinese proverb.

  In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China’s policy of “reform and opening” seemed to many to be in peril. Conventional wisdom was that it and much of the communist world were retreating into isolation, threatening a new Cold War.

  But within months the Berlin Wall fell, and soon the Soviet Union evaporated. And China changed at the speed of light.

  A country where phones were rare 20 years ago now has more internet users than any other. City skylines have morphed from grim barracks into glittering skyscrapers and a still officially Marxist society has become one of the most unequal on earth.

  After 1989 China produced perhaps the biggest economic boom in history, until it could even lend America enough cash to ruin itself. In June 1989, all that would have seemed mad fantasy.

  Then, the pundits had misunderstood what was happening. The democracy or human rights demanded by the 1989 student rebels were out of the question, but economic reform would forge ahead.

  » Read more
  • May 30, 2009 11:25 PM

• Yu Hua (余华): China’s Forgotten Revolution

  

  The New York Times has asked four writers to reflect back on the events of 1989. Yu Hua, author of the highly-acclaimed Brothers, writes, for his first time publicly, about his experiences that spring:

  I realize now that the spring of 1989 was the only time I fully understood the words “the people.” Those words have little meaning in China today.

  “The people,” or renmin, is one of the first phrases I learned to read and write. I knew our country was called “the People’s Republic of China.” Chairman Mao told us to “serve the people.” The most important paper was People’s Daily. “Since 1949, the people are the masters,” we learned to say.

  [...] Today, few young Chinese know anything about what happened at Tiananmen Square, and those who do only say vaguely, “A lot of people in the streets then, that’s what I heard.”

  The people. Still, it was not the rallies in Tiananmen Square that made me truly understand these words, but an episode one night in late May.

  See also:

  - Dance With Democracy by Li Yiyun
  - ‘Here Come the Workers!’ by Lijia Zhang
  - Exiled to English by Ha Jin

  » Read more
  • May 30, 2009 10:48 PM

• Zhao Memoir Goes on Sale

  

  The Chinese edition of the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳), former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Pary, went on sale in Hong Kong on Friday, May 29, exactly 20 years after he was forced from power for opposing the military crackdown on students in the 1989 protests.  From Radio Free Asia:

  The memoir of China’s late former leader Zhao Ziyang, who fell from power at the height of the student-led pro-democracy movement 20 years ago, went on sale Friday in Hong Kong, the only Chinese city where its publication wasn’t banned.

  The book, titled in English Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, was compiled from audio recordings made by Zhao, a former general secretary of China’s Communist Party who died under house arrest at his Beijing home in 2005.

  [...]The son of a former top Zhao aide meanwhile told a symposium on the Zhao memoirs in Hong Kong that he hoped the release of the book, which he help to produce, would put pressure on the Chinese government to revise its view of the Tiananmen protests of two decades agao, in which hundreds were killed.

  Read more about Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs on CDT here, here, here, and here.

  » Read more
  • May 30, 2009 12:42 PM

• Australia Pressed to Take Uighurs

  

  The U.S. has asked Australia to take in six of the Uighurs still held at Guantanamo Bay.  From BBC:

  US President Barack Obama has asked the Australian government to accept a group of Chinese Muslim detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

  [...]It is the first time Australia has been approached by the Obama administration over the Uighurs. Two requests by the Bush administration were turned down.

  [...]The 17 Uighurs held at the prison camp are among a group captured in Afghanistan in 2001, and cleared for release in 2004. Albania took in five of the ethnic Chinese group in 2006 but has been unwilling to take more.

  » Read more
  • May 30, 2009 12:07 PM

• Twenty Years On - Legacy of a Massacre

  

  Two lengthy articles look at the legacy of June 4th by profiling the key players. A report in the Age gets the perspectives of several of the student leaders and Du Daozheng, a former official who recently played a major role in the publication of Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs:

  “People don’t really talk about June 4 any more,” a confident public security official told The Age. “We’re far more worried about September, when this year’s university students graduate and find there aren’t any jobs.”

  The party’s obsession with controlling its past makes the achievements of a few contrarian cadres all the more unlikely.

  [...] In the 1980s, when China was being liberalised, Du edited the People’s Daily and then headed the General Administration of Press and Publications. But on May 31, 1989, as the tanks rumbled towards Beijing, Du decided he would not be meekly swept along in yet another episode of tragic Communist Party history. He says he agonised and shed “many tears” before phoning a senior leader and vowing to tear up the party membership card he had carried for 54 years if the soldiers opened fire.

  The soldiers sprayed their bullets, the party arrested Zhao, but Du did not hand in his membership card. Instead he has spent 20 years chipping away at the party’s collective guilt from the inside, trying to clear the names of the reform-minded cadres it had destroyed.

  And the Financial Times interviews Bao Tong, a senior aide to Zhao Ziyang who was the highest official to be jailed in connection to the 1989 protests:

  He greets me at the door with a wry smile, jet-black hair and a lithe frame wrapped in a Princeton University sweatshirt. It is hard to believe that he spent six years of his life doing hard labour during the Cultural Revolution and then, from 1989, another seven years in solitary confinement in the notorious Qincheng political prison. When I mention the sinister-looking men at the entrance to his apartment block who asked me to explain why I’ve come to see him, his face cracks into a sly grin.

  “I’m contributing to the country by stimulating domestic demand, increasing employment and helping solve the financial crisis,” he says. He speaks Mandarin with the soft consonants of a southerner and the confidence characteristic of a senior party cadre. “You only saw three people down there but if I want to go out I’m followed by three groups – one on foot, one in cars and one on motorbikes. Just think – it takes more than 30 people to keep an eye on me so if the government decided to monitor all 1.3bn people in China we could solve the unemployment problem for the whole world!”

  While this kind of gallows humour and the satirical use of communist propaganda slogans is common on the anonymous internet, I have never heard a senior Chinese official, even a retired one, talk like this in public.

  » Read more
  • May 29, 2009 9:30 PM

• In China, a New Breed of Dissidents

  

  Loretta Chao of the Wall Street Journal reports on today’s petitioners in China:

  The 53-year-old mother of two from China’s eastern Jiangsu province appears no different from other park visitors, dressed in a loose shirt for summer and with short hair graying at the temples. But she has an unusual calling in life: She’s a full-time protester.

  [...] Ms. Shen illustrates the changing dynamics of the Chinese protest movement since the military crackdown on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, on June 3 and 4, 1989. China’s government, which has defended its response to those protests, has never given a full accounting of the casualties from that crackdown, but hundreds of people are believed to have been killed. Back then, protesters were demanding democracy and denouncing corruption and economic mismanagement. The leaders were student intellectuals — the elite of Chinese society.

  A number of prominent intellectuals are still pushing for broad political reform. But street protests these days are organized mainly by activists like Ms. Shen, who act as champions for workers, farmers and small business owners who have run out of legal options.

  Many activists today aren’t college-educated. Ms. Shen says her education was cut short by the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, which closed schools and colleges. Some of the most high-profile demonstrations in recent years were organized by laid-off factory workers, residents of China’s poor countryside, and taxi drivers.

  » Read more
  • May 29, 2009 8:37 PM

• Jonathan Mirsky: The Long Shadow of Tiananmen

  

  For Standpoint, Jonathan Mirsky writes about the repercussions of the violence of June 4th, 1989 and remembers what he witnessed in Beijing during the protests:

  It is a measure of the significance of what happened that spring, that after 1989 and 1990, when communist regimes in eastern Europe began collapsing, China’s Communist Party remains in place, ruling well over one billion non-citizens and sitting on hundreds of billions of US dollars. To attract those dollars, Britain, together with the US, has issued demeaning statements involving Tibet and human rights. The debate about how to handle the demonstrations split the higher echelons of the party. Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang argued with Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng for negotiations with the students and lost. He appeared in the square on 19 May, muttering through a megaphone, “I have come too late.” We didn’t know he was referring to the declaration of martial law the next day. Within a few days, Zhao, now deposed, became the focus of leadership wrangling about how much he should be blamed for the “disorder”. By 1991, he had disappeared into house arrest. He died in 2005. Zhao’s secret memoir, Prisoner of the State (Simon & Schuster), composed while he was detained and smuggled to Hong Kong, has just been published. It confirms his sympathy for the Tiananmen demonstrators and his misery as he heard the sound of gunfire from the square. “I told myself,” Zhao whispered into a hidden tape recorder so as not to be heard by his guards, “that no matter what, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on the students. The students are only asking us to correct our flaws, not overthrow our political system.”

  » Read more
  • May 28, 2009 4:05 PM

• James Miles: The Lost Voices of Tiananmen - Part Two

  

  James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in 1989 and has lived in the country ever since, has produced a 22-minute report reflecting on the meaning of events 20 years ago. Listen to it here. Part One is here.

  » Read more
  • May 27, 2009 10:02 PM

• In Today’s Headlines, an Absence Speaks a Thousand Words

  

  For China Media Project, David Bandurski reads between the lines of official media reporting of the 20th anniversary of June 4th:

  The Beijing Daily article paints an important, if impressionistic, picture of current efforts to bolster security ahead of the June 4th anniversary. Security, for example, has reportedly been heightened in and around Peking University, and police and government departments have been placed on a high level of alert.

  Whatever assertions might be made about the irrelevance of June 4th for young Chinese today, the official language of “stability preservation work” underlines the ongoing importance of the 1989 protests in the party’s own mind.

  Clearly, officials at every level are under the strictest orders to take the anniversary very seriously. And one must wonder: why is a generation of ostensibly indifferent university students of such concern to Beijing’s party secretary?

  » Read more
  • May 27, 2009 10:27 AM

• China Protesters See Red over Pelosi Visit

  

  Reuters reports on protests that greeted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in Beijing:

  Police quickly dragged away the small group demonstrating in front of a central government office — far from any of the sites visited by Pelosi and other Congress members, who have been focused on climate change negotiations.

  Demonstrations over everything from pollution to crime are common in China, but rare in front of major government offices in tightly controlled Beijing. Some of the protesters spray-painted red slogans on the main gate of the State Council Information Office reading “Pelosi we love you,” “Warmly welcome Pelosi, pay attention to human rights” and “Down with corruption.”

  See photos of the protest. See also an AFP report.

  Pelosi has played down her usual focus on human rights issues during her visit and concentrated on building a cooperative relationship with China on climate change. From Time:

  Ahead of this week’s visit to China, Pelosi’s first as Speaker of the House, there was some nervousness in China that the high-ranking Democrat would publicly raise human-rights concerns at a sensitive time in Beijing — just one week before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. But thus far, the American politician, who is facing questions at home about what she knew of the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects, has given her hosts little to worry about. When she did mention human rights, it was in the broad context of international relations, rather than specific criticism of China’s record. “In every country, not just China and the U.S., the global climate crisis is best surmounted with transparency and openness, respect for the rule of law and accountability to the people,” she said in her Beijing talk.

  » Read more
  • May 27, 2009 10:12 AM

• Xu Youyu (徐友渔): From 1989 to 2009: 20 Years of Evolution in Chinese Thought (2/2)

  

  During Mother’s Day weekend on May 10th, a number of intellectuals in Beijing organized a seminar discussing 20 years of the democracy movement in China. The seminar started with a moment of silence, paying tribute to the Tiananmen Mothers.

  Xu Youyu (徐友渔), professor and researcher at Philosophy Institute of The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), presented the following text at the seminar, from peacehall.com, translated by E. Shih. This is Part II of his talk. Part I is here:

  Ideological Fantasy is Shattered by the Sound of Guns

  In order to explain the severity and deep ramifications of the June 4th gunning, I would like to say that the old ideology has such a long history and such a strong, tough hold that the people would never have been free of it without the fresh blood of June Fourth. In order to demonstrate the ideology’s insidious, barely perceptible powers of osmosis, I will add boldly an observation of 1989 that will most certainly be controversial: In fact, a significant portion of the spiritual resources supporting the 1989 student movement came from the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology. The effectiveness of this ideology was destroyed in its self-massacre.

  It’s not that the students did not know how serious the consequences could be for rushing out of the school gates into the streets and squares for a mass protest under Communist Party rule. That’s only one side of the story. The other side of the story is that the CCP has been indoctrinating students on campus with teachings on “May Fourth,” “January 29th,” and “the Patriotic Students Movement,” and these movements became a mobilizing spiritual force. They seeded a deep belief in the students of their own legitimacy and of justice, so that they truly believed that the connection between the values of “patriotism, democracy” and the movement was natural.

  As a revolutionary party, the CCP knows well how to wield the resources of ethnic history. It incorporated “May Fourth” and “January 29th” into its own ideological system, but it did not fully understand the double-edged nature of these resources. In reality, students in the “August Ninth People’s Movement” thought of themselves as the successors of the “May Fourth” and “January 29th” spirit. During that time, I heard directly and indirectly of CCP officials passing on their past revolutionary experiences to the students. The spiritual resonance on both sides was very natural. I should also mention that, out of ideological habit, the regime for the most part endorsed the students’ “passionate patriotism” in abstract terms. This, no doubt, made the students feel that their actions were continuous with and not rebelling against the heritage of recent Chinese revolutionism. Not until the guns sounded were they shocked by the regime’s sudden about-face.

  After the June Fourth suppression, the regime fabricated a theory of “liberalized intellectuals” being the grand “puppet master” behind the students’ actions: the black threads ran from Fang Lizhi to his wife Li Shuxian to student leader Wang Dan to regular students. Even if we put aside the fact that this theory is extremely far-fetched, and assume for a moment that there was such a black thread in addition to the influence of the general intellectual atmosphere of the time upon students, we could not explain why tens of thousands of students—who had passed through political background checks in order to enter college in the first place—would become “anti-party and anti-socialism.”

  I remember clearly going to Tiananmen Square in May of 1989 and trying to persuade the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute (now the University of Science and Technology Beijing) students who were meditating there in protest to go back to school. I said the troops were about to enter the city, and the suppression was about to start. Two doctoral students said without a second thought, “Why would the people’s army suppress us?” The students’ naiveté and earnestness make me sigh even today.

  The students were as such, and civilians were generally not far off. Beijing citizens blocked military vehicles and martial officers from entering the city, while simultaneously bringing food and drink to the troops in support of their men. When the guns were fired, the people’s first reaction was shock and hurt, followed by rage.

  During the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, a student movement leader said, just before the violent suppression began, that they would use fresh blood to awaken the Chinese people. These words were unfortunately prescient. Using such methods and paying such a price to obtain an understanding of Chinese history and political reality is particularly unfortunate; but the kind-hearted Chinese people could not have woken up with a jolt if not for this cruel blow.

  From Democracy to Human Rights and Legalization
  
  The heart of the 1989 student movement’s demands was democracy, and it brought with it a strong sense of justice-seeking within the system. We can see this from the seven demands of the April 18 petition that the students sent to the standing committee of the People’s Congress. The first demand was a fair evaluation of Hu Yaobang. The second was a disavowal of the “spiritual purge” and “anti-liberalization” movements. The third was the disclosure of property records for leaders and their children. The fourth asked for the end of media censorship and a new media law. The fifth asked for increased educational funds and a salary raise for intellectuals. The sixth asked for the annulment of Beijing’s anti-demonstration rules. The seventh asked for unrestricted reporting on student activities.

  This is a clear reflection of the demands for human rights and legalization that came 20 years later. We could say that “Charter 08” has distilled the demands for human rights and legalization.

  To start with fundamentals, democracy and human rights are universal values that are sought after by peoples across the world. However, in China’s specific situation, democracy has actually become a familiar mainstream ideological concept. The Chinese Communist Party is a bad match for democracy, whether in terms of structural principles or in executed action; yet it has inherited the May Fourth concept of “democracy” in name. Furthermore, it successfully wielded this concept in the battle for legitimacy with the Kuomintang, using the slogan “We Want Democracy.”

  To the current regime, “human rights” is a more sensitive term than “democracy,” and to Chinese people who are fighting for democracy, it is also a bolder concept. Only with that meaning in mind can we understand the scene described by Bao Zunxin in his memoire, June Fourth Behind the Scenes: an Incomplete Nirvana: On January 28, 1989, a group of intellectuals gathered at the Doule Bookstore in Beijing. Fang Lizhi made a speech calling for human rights, and the response was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. The whole gathering fell into an awkward silence.

  After 20 years, the clearest change and contrast in thought is that 20 years ago, everyone was focused on culture; and now, the focal point is on political system. The atmosphere that dominated society in the 80s was “culture fever,” and at the heart of it was “aesthetics fever.” Other hot topics—such as humanism, alienation, subjectivity and an East-West dialectic—all had metaphysical abstractness. As for the sensational political debate television series, “River Elegy,” that was even more clearly using a discourse of civilizational and cultural type—the so-called yellow civilization in contrast with the blue civilization—to analyze China’s practical choices in the real world. This situation has shown itself to have limits, and refracted the frustration. Because of censorship, the people had no choice but to turn their practical anti-authoritarian criticism into a criticism of feudalistic culture. The limitation of this approach was that the intellectual circles were stuck in a rut, discussing problems of “ultimate compassion,” and had no interest or psychological strategies for facing the large-scale changes in society. It is very clear that the intellectuals were at a total loss for strategy in 1989, whether it was in terms of thought or in terms of knowledge.

  20 years later the situation is fundamentally different, because for these 20 years the core of Chinese thought has had a momentous turn: from abstraction to the concrete, from ultimate compassion to scrutiny of policy arrangements. The core of knowledge has also had a momentous turn: from a humanities spirit towards social science, from philosophy and aesthetics towards economics, law, sociology, political science, etc. The legislative demands embody the thinking of current Chinese thought apropos of future nation-building principles and policy arrangement for China. Recently, the emergence of various events in support of rights shows that the demand for human rights has deepened and become more concrete in the past 20 years.

  Persisting in Logical and Gradual Change

  In the 20 years from 1989 to 2009, the Chinese people have had something continuous and stubbornly unchanging: a non-violent, logical, and gradual mode of change.

  Non-violent protest was the unchanging principle of the 1989 democracy movement. The identification with, advocacy of and loyalty to this principle was a special characteristic of that movement, and it was not easy to come by. In several thousand years of Chinese history, the unchanging rule was that of one tyranny replacing another. Among civilians, the idea of taking “the justice of heaven” into ones own hands was very deeply rooted, as well. As for this generation of young people, the influence of “classics” such as Mao Zedong’s “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” taught them that it took brains and courage to abandon their arms, to seek dialogue, and to consider compromise. This “89” generation achieved this stance as a result of the ideological tradition of self-examination and critique.

  In the past 20 years, the people’s understanding of the principle of non-violence has continued to become clearer and deeper. The generation that has experienced the christening of “89” have advocated and remained loyal to this principle as they aided the base level of human rights activism. Combined with the methods of legalizing human rights, this has in recent years had a positive effect on the development and success of human rights activism, as well as China’s legalization.

  After “89,” the outstanding change in China’s thought has been an abandonment of zealous revolutionary ideology. This kind of change has far-reaching ramifications for China as it moves towards modern political civilization. However, in the development of thought, another tendency has also been spawning, and that is a growing cynicism.

  On top of the suppression of mass movement and the purge that quickly followed in the wake of a mass social movement, there was an encroaching get-rich-quick opportunism and trend of going private in the 1990s. This environment led many people to quickly change their mindset from one of grief and anger to one of obedience. Others, in defense of their current way of life, began advocating a certain kind of historical and life philosophy on the level of thought. Their concepts implied that a definitive rupture with the old radical ideology entailed writing off all mass protest. Some even advocated a “paycheck philosophy” in the name of “saying farewell to the revolution,” which was a philosophy of obedience and cynicism.

  Clearly, abandoning radicalism is not equal to not demanding any sort of change; insisting upon a logical and gradual method is not equal to accepting the present situation in a total absence of critique and resistance. Rejecting a totalistic philosophy does not equal not taking no responsibility for society. Currently, the regime relies entirely upon lies and terror to maintain a status quo; today’s Chinese society exists in an atmosphere and ethical situation of no truth-telling and no justice-seeking. The Chinese people who experienced and inherited the spirit of “89” are strongly advocating a kind of assertive civil society consciousness, civic ethics and civic duty. They insist that everyone should say what they really think, and work diligently to change the status quo; that no one can simply accept a life of terror and alienation, and be satisfied in self-preservation and personal benefit.

  From 1989 to 2009, the face and social psychology of China’s society has undergone an enormous change. Yet the standard of thought and knowledge capability of the leaders who took the political stage after “89” did not change. They did not absorb any lessons from the “89” incident; they took no direction from the process of democratization in Taiwan. By contrast, the Chinese people who experienced and inherited the spirit of “89” never stopped learning, thinking and probing. They become more mature by the day. They use their strong will to suffer through the darkness, and use the light of their thought to welcome the future.

  Posted： Friday, May 15, 2009

  » Read more
  • May 27, 2009 6:27 AM

• China Lawyers: Touchy Cases Could Mean Disbarment

  

  From AP:

  China has threatened to disbar as many as 20 lawyers known for taking sensitive human rights cases, several of the lawyers said Wednesday, in the latest apparent clampdown on legal activists.

  Lawyers said officials with justice agencies had issued warnings to leading members of their law firms in meetings and over the phone and that annual accreditations have yet to be issued only days before the June 1 renewal date.

  If carried through, the disbarments on technicalities would mark the broadest effort in recent years by the authoritarian government to rein in a growing number of activist lawyers. Previously, only a few were disbarred, though threats, beatings and other acts of intimidation have been common.

  Read also an article from the New York Times, and previous coverage from CDT.

  » Read more
  • May 27, 2009 5:37 AM

• Doomsday for Chinese Human-Rights Lawyers?

  

  An opinion piece in the Asian Wall Street Journal looks at an apparent government crackdown on lawyers who work on human rights-related cases:

  Last year Mr. Jiang was one of at least three rights lawyers known to have temporarily lost their licenses in this way, but this year there may be many more. I spoke by telephone or in person to 16 human-rights lawyers who have yet to renew their licenses. Some of these lawyers may receive their licenses before the May 31 deadline or shortly afterwards — one even said he had been specifically instructed to apply for his renewal on May 30, the second-to-last day.

  [...] Some lawyers disagree that the government is treating them equally. Not only do they point to a wide-spread delay in issuing credentials specifically to lawyers with human-rights practices. They believe the delay is linked to the sensitivities of the anniversaries of the June 4 Tiananmen crackdown and the founding of the People’s Republic, as well as a general tightening of control. “The Ministry of Justice uses the ‘annual exam’ to limit and restrict lawyers’ professional rights,” says Xie Yanyi, who handles cases for people with AIDS and represents farmers in land-rights cases.

  The last few months have also seen an uptick in physical violence and detentions of these lawyers. In April, two were badly beaten by thugs in separate incidents. Earlier this month, lawyers Zhang Kai and Li Chunfu were beaten up and detained while investigating a case in Chongqing. For lawyers who lose their licenses, there is little recourse. Although technically they are allowed to sue the Ministry of Justice for reinstatement, there have been no successful cases of this nature in the past, according to several legal scholars.

  See also “China: Leading Civil Rights Lawyers Face Threats to Licenses” from Human Rights Watch.

  » Read more
  • May 26, 2009 9:35 PM

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