CSCL | Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers

Lawyers Call Upon Chinese Authorities To Provide Full Accounting of Gao Zhisheng Case

Date: 2011-12-22

“You going to prison, that’s a dream. You’re not good enough for that.

Whenever we want you to disappear, you will disappear.”

— Police to Gao Zhisheng during his enforced disappearance between Feb. 2009 and Mar. 2010

On December 22, 2006, Gao Zhisheng, one of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers, was sentenced to three years for inciting subversion, with a five year reprieve and an additional year of deprivation of political rights. Today would have marked the end of his five-year probation—yet, Gao remains missing, held incommunicado since April 20, 2010. Just 6 days shy of the expiration of this 5 year probation period, a Beijing court revoked Gao’s probation, declaring that he would serve his full sentence of 3 years, on account of “seriously violating probation rules.” The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers calls upon Chinese authorities to provide a full accounting of Gao’s disappearance, a comprehensive explanation for his renewed detention, and confirmation as to Gao’s physical safety and well-being.

Gao’s disappearance of 610 days amounts to an enforced disappearance in violation of international law.[1] Despite international calls for information and Gao’s release, Chinese authorities have consistently denied that Gao was in their custody, insisting that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts. No information has been provided as to the probation violations that Gao allegedly committed, nor as to where he is being held. Given past reports of torture and abuse while disappeared or detained, the Committee is extremely concerned about Gao’s state of mental and physical well-being.

China has repeatedly avowed its commitment to rule of law, yet Gao’s case is illustrative of a documented trend of secret detentions and disappearances of Chinese rights lawyers and activists that escalated in 2011. The National People’s Congress will soon consider proposed revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law, one of which would allow authorities to hold individuals accused of endangering national security or terrorism at undisclosed locations for up to six months without family notification—in effect, authorizing incommunicado detentions and enforced disappearances. The Beijing’s court decision to revoke Gao’s probation is extremely alarming because it is the most recent attempt by Chinese authorities to cynically use the legal system to camouflage the illegality and arbitrariness of Gao’s disappearance.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers calls upon Chinese authorities to:

Provide information about where Gao Zhisheng is being held;
Assure the international community that Gao is in a healthy state of mental and physical well-being, given past reports of torture and abuse;
Provide a full accounting for the last 20 months of Gao’s disappearance
Provide a comprehensive explanation for why Gao has been sent back to prison

[1] Enforced disappearance is defined under international law as the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty of a person either by state agents or with official support, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, art. 2, G.A. Res. A/61/177, entered into force Dec. 23, 2006.

Disappeared Lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, Sent Back to Prison

Date: 2011-12-16

On Dec. 16, 2011, China’s official news agency reported that the Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court sent disappeared lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, back to prison for “seriously violating probation rules.” Gao was sentenced to three years in prison with five years of probation on Dec. 22, 2006 for inciting subversion of state power—the court’s decision to revoke his probation means that Gao will spend the next 3 years in jail. Gao, a prominent human rights lawyer, was last seen on April 20, 2010; before that, Gao had been held incommunicado from Feb. 2009 before he resurfaced on March 18, 2010. Chinese authorities have consistently denied that Gao was in their custody, insisting that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts. Gao’s secret detention and disappearances, compounded by this recent sentencing by the Beijing court, is an extremely worrisome indicator the use of legal tools to camouflage illegal disappearances. For more news coverage on Gao’s case, see, this Dec. 16, 2011 New York Times article.

Lawyers Call for Legal Reforms to Limit Use of Illegal Measures Against Chinese Colleagues

Author: csclawyers@gmail.com
Date: 2011-11-08

Chinese authorities made extensive use of extra-legal measures in a crackdown that targeted rights lawyers and legal activists this year, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers said in a report released today. The measures used to silence an unprecedented number of rights lawyers and other activists signal a shrinking space for legal activism and advocacy that may leave their clients—already vulnerable individuals and groups—with far fewer advocates. The Committee calls on the international community, including lawyers, bar associations, and academic institutions, to stand with them and urge the Chinese government to increase protections for lawyers so that they may carry out their professional responsibilities without fear of reprisal.

The report, Legal Advocacy and the 2011 Crackdown in China: Adversity, Repression, and Resilience, details the escalation of punitive action taken against rights lawyers, legal activists, and other activists in China since February 2011 (see Graphic 1: Anatomy of a Crackdown), including through enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, physical and mental abuse, and intimidation and harassment, signaling. Many of the individuals profiled in the report represent a vanguard of lawyers that take on the most difficult and politically sensitive cases in China, including cases of religious freedom, freedom of expression, access to housing, environmental justice, and access to information. The 2011 crackdown disabled this community through disruption and isolation, both physical (through extra-legal detentions and forced relocations) (see Graphic 3: Fragmenting Community through Relocations) and virtual (by silencing online discussions, including over Twitter) (see Graphic 2: Lawyers Tweeting the 2011 Crackdown).

Rights lawyers represent a comparatively small part of China’s legal community but play a fundamental role in the system, representing the most vulnerable groups and individuals. Attacks that target these lawyers leave others without a legal defense and threaten the Chinese legal profession as a whole. By September 2011, many of the lawyers targeted since February began to re-emerge publicly, but the comprehensiveness of the crackdown, coupled with draft amendments to the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law that would expand police detention powers if adopted, hints at a possible systemization of these measures to silence rights lawyers and other activists in future.

Graphic 2: Lawyers Tweeting the 2011 Crackdown

The Committee’s report considers cases of individual lawyers and analyses their experiences using both international human rights law and domestic Chinese criminal and criminal procedure law. It concludes with a series of targeted and detailed recommendations. These include recommendations aimed at the international community that seek to promote the rights of lawyers as a professional group inside China. The Committee also calls on the Chinese authorities to review and investigate the cases of individual harassed rights lawyers; investigate cases where the use of extra-legal measures have been documented; and bring domestic laws related to criminal defense and the rights of lawyers into conformity with international standards.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers (www.csclawyers.org) is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

The Executive Summary and Summary of Recommendations of Legal Advocacy and the 2011 Crackdown in China: Adversity, Repression, and Resilience, is available here.

Silence of The Dissidents

Date: 2011-07-04

Fan Yafeng, a respected legal advocate, received a call inviting him to the local police station for a chat.

When he got there, a hood was thrown over his head. He was shoved into a car and taken to an undisclosed place. Fan was forced to sit motionless for more than 10 hours and was beaten if he moved.

He was tortured for nine days and threatened with 20 years in prison for allegedly engaging in illegal business practices and subversion.

Released almost two weeks later, the normally fearless legal expert was a broken man. He refused to go public with what had happened to him and asked friends not to contact him.

Fellow lawyers thought this reticence was a mistake.

"People were afraid the methods used against him would be used against other lawyers," one colleague said.

And that is exactly what has happened to numerous rights lawyers and activists in the months since.

One expert on human rights said the frightened lawyer was No 1 on a list of some 20 lawyers and countless activists who were targeted. Over the following months, these lawyers were picked off, one after another, each in turn facing a similar cycle of abduction, detention, beatings and, sometimes, torture.

The campaign has given rise to a new vocabulary of fear, including phrases such as "to be disappeared" and "to be black-hooded."

Each victim emerged from captivity insisting on remaining silent.

"I'm sorry, but I can't chat with you for the time being," one normally outspoken dissident told this reporter over a Skype exchange soon after his release from detention. "I have to keep a low profile for a while."

In one surprisingly frank and desperate tweet on the Twitter website, lawyer Li Xiongbing wrote after being detained for two days: "I'm really very afraid right now; please don't try to reach me, OK?"

He said he was returning to his hometown to be with his parents and to seek psychological help.

For years, rights lawyers and dissidents have played a game of cat and mouse with the mainland authorities, refusing to buckle in the face of harassment, licence revocations, detentions, beatings and, sometimes, brutal torture and imprisonment.

But over the past six months, the feared guobao, or domestic security apparatus, which monitors the activities of activists, has adopted unknown new tactics that have frightened its targets into silence.

"The methods they're using are different now," a Beijing lawyer said. "Now no one is willing to talk. When you call them, they won't even answer the phone. They obviously received a serious warning. The methods being used have exceeded their ability to withstand the pressure."

The lawyer said the level of fear has been raised, "sending a message of fright to the entire society."

Apart from going silent, some lawyers have started to turn down cases.

"These lawyers used to take controversial cases," said one US-based lawyer, "but since the crackdown, it has been noted by one of the lawyers that it is difficult for people to find lawyers for sensitive cases, especially religious cases, such as those involving the Falun Gong."

Many of the lawyers and activists have been illegally detained and held for excessive periods in violation of Chinese laws. In some instances, people have been abducted off the streets, with a black hood thrown over their heads by non-uniformed security officers.

The victims of "black-hooding" are often illegally held in unknown locations, incommunicado for periods ranging from days to months in what some call a "black box". Sometimes the abductions are carried out by thugs hired by the police to intimidate the targets.

"The most worrisome thing is that what we know the least about is what measures they're using to keep people silent upon their release," said Jerome Cohen, professor and co-director of the US-Asia Law Institute at New York University's school of law and adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Many of these guys are tough. What could be so effective? Apparently, there are new measures that are making them less willing to be contacted upon their release.

"What could you do to these people to make them unusually silent when they should have expressed outrage?"

Some details of the treatment may be known to fellow lawyers, but except for a handful of cases, those released have vehemently refused to go public with what happened to them, apparently under threat from the authorities, who warned them not to speak.

Even when the details are known, experts and journalists have been reluctant to speak publicly about them for fear the release of the information could result in official retaliation.

In some cases, however, it is believed the targets were allowed to tell fellow lawyers of their experience, using a strategy called "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys".

"We felt, at the same time, they wanted him to speak out in order to raise the level of terror," the Beijing lawyer quoted earlier said of a colleague who had been detained.

"They wanted to use him to threaten everyone else."

The human rights scholar agreed, saying: "This is a perfect way of spreading terror."

Cohen feared that the methods used by police were "more sinister" than torture methods known to have been used before. "Is there something more and more unnerving?"

According to some reports, threats have been made regarding the family members of the people targeted in the campaign.

In one case, police summoned the wife and small child of a lawyer to the police station, where they were intimidated. Police told the wife: "We can deal with you in the same way we dealt with your husband."

Another lawyer was repeatedly warned: "You should think about your family."

"This is the revival of the old custom of family retribution - collective criminal punishment," Cohen said, referring to a tradition from imperial days, when the relatives of criminals were also punished.

"I worry about threats to family members. How can you risk your family for human rights?"

It seems certain that plain old torture has been used in many cases.

Jin Guanghong, a rights lawyer, was forcibly medicated after going on a hunger strike. Sources said he could no longer remember clearly what happened when he was in captivity.

Tang Jingling, a Guangzhou lawyer who also was forcibly medicated, seemed unable to recognise people since his release, other sources said.

Many of those detained were apparently forced to sign confessions, letters of repentance and guarantees they would not engage in rights work any more or have contact with foreign friends, the media or people within their circles. And if they met anyone, they were required to report it to the police.

The techniques used to secure compliance appear to have been consistent.

"They were made to confess, and then they made the person take the transcript and read it out to the camera," a source said.

"There were varying numbers of promises and commitments that had to be made, but all of the lawyers who were detained could only be taken back if they signed guarantee promises."

Detainees were asked about a few general topics: contact with foreigners, whom the police see as anti-Chinese; oppositionists, lawyers and other activists who challenge the party; and the "jasmine revolution".

According to a translation by Global Views, Shanghai-based rights lawyer Li Tiantian confided on her blog after her release that she had provided information about 30 people she knew. She said she "wrote down all the facts that I know."

The signing of such documents, even under duress, appears to be having a huge impact on these lawyers and dissidents.

"Signing a letter of repentance or a guarantee means you have been broken in the eyes of your friends and perhaps in your own eyes," the human rights scholar said.

She said it was still remarkable, however, that the detainees had been so effectively silenced as a result.

"It's the shame," she suggested. "Chinese friends themselves comment that China has a culture of heroes. You have to be absolutely able to withstand everything. Even if they understand that these expectations are exaggerated, they will still feel under pressure to live up to them.

"In addition, some have obviously been threatened with criminal prosecution, so any documents they have been forced to sign could later be used as evidence against them.

"There are also recordings of people reading their own documents, and so there is a risk of further humiliation if these are ever released."

Li, who was detained for three months, wrote on her blog following her release that her boyfriend and his siblings had been visited by the police several times and were asked to break ties with her.

The boyfriend and his family were forced to watch a video that showed Li walking into hotels with a string of other men, implying she was having sex with them.

China watchers are scratching their heads over this spate of arrests, which some say is the worst crackdown since the 1989 bloody suppression of student demonstrators. The detentions began to intensify at the end of last year and picked up steam in February after attempts to launch a "jasmine revolution" in China.

"These people are the only source of legal resistance," Cohen said. "It's a small group, and if you can disable them, people can't defend their rights."

One lawyer who was detained for an extended period, during which he was not allowed to sleep for days at a time, was beaten for two days and forced to zuoban, or sit motionless, for hours. Several security officers took turns interrogating him, asking him the same hundreds of questions over and over again.

In the end, he, too, caved in. When he was released, he was much thinner, people who saw him said.

They say the draft letters of repentance that he signed reached this high," said the Beijing lawyer, holding his hand out about 30cm over a coffee table. Another source said the detained lawyer signed no fewer than eight guarantees.

Tang Jitian, who was held for 21 days, was diagnosed with tuberculosis upon his release. It is said his body was weakened by his being given little food, limited clothing to wear and being forced to withstand strong air conditioning during his detention.

The human rights scholar said the lawyers who were detained in recent months spent much less time in captivity, "having made up their mind that they would co-operate sooner rather than later."

"One interpretation is that the intimidation has already worked," the US-based lawyer said. "There's no need to spend months to break the lawyers."

Li, who wrote she was in a hospital for three months, an obvious reference to her detention, published a parable on her blog one day after being released on May 24.

She described a hornet that was worried a little bird might disturb its nest.

According to one translation: "The hornet grabbed the little bird and began stinging it frenziedly. Unable to bear the hornet's stings and thinking there was no point suffering this ordeal, the bird realised that no one would gain anything and there was no way to change the hornet's ways. So the bird knelt down to the hornet and kowtowed in order to extricate itself.

"The hornet, knowing that the force of justice was on the rise in the animal world, didn't dare do anything rash to the bird and came up with a plan that would satisfy everyone. It agreed to release the little bird, but only if the bird promised: 1) not to speak of the past few months; 2) not to damage the hornet's reputation; and 3) not to urge other animals to stir up the hornet's nest. Finally, the bird was freed."

Li concluded by saying she would not stick her head out again for a while: "Under the present circumstances, there's nothing wrong with being a tortoise hiding its head. At least they live to an old age."

But, as if she could not bow down, Li began tweeting the very next day, describing the details of her interrogations. She described how national security officers used information they had gathered about her sexual relationships with other men in an attempt to intimidate her and, by extension, other lawyers.

The blog was soon shut down.

The human rights scholar said the silence of the lawyers might be a temporary thing.

She said that as people were released, they had slowly been getting in touch with one another, often surreptitiously, such as in "chance" brief encounters in a produce market or a store.

Cohen said he believed there were discussions going on within the top leadership about the campaign.

"How can you expect unanimity on a question like this?" he said.

The American expert on China's legal system said the campaign of terror could only come to an end "if the top leadership decides to stop it."

The Beijing lawyer, however, was doubtful things would return to normal soon.

"Some people are optimistic things will change in a few years," he said. "I don't think so.

"The measures have been very effective. It will go on for a while."

The cases

Jin Guanghong, lawyer Forcibly medicated; tied up and beaten; given injections. Can't remember much. Disappeared on April 8 or 9 and returned home on April 19.

Tang Jingling , lawyer Forcibly medicated; tied up and beaten; given injections. Can't remember much. Put under residential surveillance for "inciting subversion of state power" but being held outside his residence.

Jiang Tianyong , lawyer Detained for two months, from February 19 to April 19. Beaten for two days for refusing to collaborate.

Teng Biao , lawyer Detained for about 68 days.

Tang Jitian , lawyer Detained from Feb 16 to March 4.

Li Fangping , lawyer Detained from April 29 to May 4.

Li Xiongbing, lawyer Detained for two days, May 4-6.

Xu Zhiyong, lawyer Detained for one day.

Liu Shihui, lawyer Missing since Feb 20. Earlier, he was brutally beaten by a group of unidentified individuals at a bus stop. [CSCL update: Liu was reported released in June and returned to his home village in Inner Mongolia]

Li Tiantian, lawyer Disappeared on Feb 19 and reappeared on May 24.

Liu Xiaoyuan, lawyer Detained for six days.

Ni Yulan , lawyer, and husband Dong Jiqin Believed charged with "creating a disturbance", Ni and her husband were taken into detention on April 17. She is thought in poor health.

Fan Yafeng, legal scholar Taken to a secret location on December 9 and tortured for several days.

Ai Weiwei, artist Detained on April 3. Ai has not yet been formally arrested or indicted.

Ran Yunfei, writer and blogger Detained on February 20. Formally arrested on March 25 for "inciting subversion of state power".

Wang Lihong, citizen journalist Taken on March 21 and formally arrested on April 20, and charged with "assembling a crowd to disrupt social order". In poor health.

Yu Jie, writer Believed to have been seriously tortured.

Lawyers Urge Solidarity With Chinese Colleagues

Author: jchia@law.fordham.edu
Date: 2011-06-04

“I'll bet that there will be others in the future who, like me, will become increasingly mute… Maybe everyone should learn from me and be a tortoise hiding its head, for it’s because
I’ve done this that not a single hair on my body has been harmed. Of course,
perhaps there’s been a huge earthquake inside my heart.”

— lawyer Li Tiantian’s blog entry, posted after her return home after two months of secret detention

On the 22^nd anniversary of the violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, Chinese authorities are engaged in the most severe crackdown on lawyers and human rights defenders since 1989. Just as the protestors who gathered in Tiananmen Square in 1989 called for democratic reform, today, many of China’s human rights lawyers have developed a deep-rooted conviction that the rule of law is not merely a superficial gloss—that it in fact represents a framework for justice that applies equally to all, and with the power to hold even the State that created it accountable.

China has repeatedly avowed its commitment to the rule of law but in recent months has taken violent steps to silence its human rights lawyers. Lawyers are essential to the establishment and maintenance of the rule of law; they play an integral part in the mechanisms that lead to the even-handed and predictable enforcement of laws. As United Nations General Assembly has unanimously recognized, there is nothing disloyal or subversive about a lawyer defending alleged criminals, unpopular clients, or whistleblowers working to bring official corruption to light.

Li Tiantian is among the wave of lawyers, human rights defenders, and activists who have been arbitrarily detained by the government since February, in apparent response to fears of a Chinese “Jasmine” revolution. Lawyers who have been disappeared, detained, tortured and beaten, include:

Tang Jitian, disappeared in February; after three weeks he was released to house arrest
Teng Biao, disappeared in February for 70 days
Jiang Tianyong, disappeared in February for two months
Liu Shihui, missing since February
Tang Jingling, charged with “inciting subversion of state power” in March
Li Fangping, disappeared for five days in April
Ni Yulan, criminally detained since April and held on unspecified charges
Jin Guanghong, disappeared tortured for ten days in April
Li Xiongbing, disappeared for three days in May

As fellow lawyers, we repudiate these attacks on our Chinese counterparts. At this time, when so many of our Chinese colleagues are being silenced, it is imperative that we speak out on their behalf in order to ensure that this disturbing abuse does not successfully quash their efforts to establish the rule of law in China.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers (http://www.csclawyers.org) is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there. The Committee, which is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School in New York City, seeks to strengthen the role of lawyers and to promote their independence.

Encourage your local Bar Association to support Chinese lawyers. For more information and address information for open letters, please send a request to jchia@law.fordham.edu.

A Special Meeting at the New York City Bar Association: What Should the Legal Community Do About the Arrest of Chinese Lawyers?

Date: 2011-04-20

Dear All,

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is co-sponsoring a Special Meeting on "What Should the Legal Community Do About the Arrest of Chinese Lawyers?" at the New York City Bar Association. The event is on April 20, from noon to 2PM. This meeting will explore what further steps the U.S. legal community should take in response to this continuing threat to the professional independence of lawyers and the rule of law in China.

Moderator:
Stephen L. Kass, Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP

Speakers:
Jerome A. Cohen, NYU School of Law; Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Hualing Fu, Professor of Law, Hong Kong University
Phelim Kine, Human Rights Watch
Scott Greathead, Wiggin & Dana; Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers

Sponsored by:
Committee on International Human Rights, Stephen L. Kass, Chair; Council on International Affairs, Mark R. Shulman, Chair; NYU's US-Asia Law Institute; Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers

I hope that you will be able to join us for the discussion on what the legal community in New York and elsewhere can and should do about the continuing arrests, detentions and disappearances of Chinese lawyers since February 2011.

Best regards,

Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers

UN Working Group Voice Serious Concern About Enforced Disappearances of Lawyers in China

Date: 2011-04-08

The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (“WGEID”) expressed serious concern about the recent wave of enforced disappearances that have allegedly taken place in China over the last few months.

The WGEID has received multiple reports of a number of persons being subject to enforced disappearances including the lawyers Teng Biao, Tang Jitian, Jiang Tianyong and Tang Jingling.

In a press statement issued in Geneva, the working group stated that “According to the allegations received, there is a pattern of enforced disappearances in China, where persons suspected of dissent are taken to secret detention facilities, and are then often tortured and intimidated, before being released or put into ‘soft detention’ and barred from contacting the outside world.”

“Enforced disappearance is a crime under international law. Even short-term secret detentions can qualify as enforced disappearances,” the UN expert body said. “There can never be an excuse to disappear people, especially when those persons are peacefully expressing their dissent with the Government of their country.”

The working group added it is also concerned by several long-running cases of reported disappearances, including a case from 1995 involving six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, also known as the 11th Panchen Lama, and the February 2009 disappearance of human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng.

The experts called on China to release all those who have been forcibly disappeared and to provide information on the fate and whereabouts of people who have allegedly disappeared. The WGEID also called on Chinese authorities to ensure that full investigations take place and that there are internal reparations to those who have “suffered this heinous practice.”

Created in 1980, the working group’s members are independent and they report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The working group’s chair-rapporteur is Jeremy Sarkin of South Africa. Its other members are: Ariel Dulitkzy (Argentina), Jasminka Dzumhur (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Osman El-Hajjé (Lebanon) and Olivier de Frouville (France).

The New York City Bar Association calls for an end to attacks on Chinese lawyers

Date: 2011-03-19

In response to the recent crackdown against China's human rights lawyers, the New York City Bar Association has sent a letter to China’s Ministry of Justice expressing its “grave concern with respect to reports over the past several weeks that lawyers in various parts of China have been harassed, beaten, and detained at the hands of agents of the government.” The letter documents the recent upswing in the physical abuse of lawyers, including an in-court beating of eight defense lawyers by court officers in Harbin City, during which pregnant lawyer Liu Guiying sustained injuries severe enough to force her to terminate her pregnancy; and the savage beating ofGuangzhou-based lawyer Liu Shihui, as he waited for a bus that would allegedly proceed to the location of a demonstration. Additionally, the letter urges the Ministy to investigate the five lawyers recently seized and held in secret detention: Jiang Tianyong, Teng Biao, Tang Jitian, Tang Jingling, and Li Tiantian.

Since the City Bar's letter was released, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers has learned that Tang Jitian has been released from detention, after suffering serious abuse and torture at the hands of his captors.

Lawyers Call For an End to Police Harassment, Abuse and Detention of Supporters of Chen Guangcheng

Date: 2011-02-18

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers calls on the Beijing Lawyers Association, the Shanghai Bar Association and other Chinese bar groups to investigate reports that fellow lawyers were among those beaten, detained, and harassed in the aftermath of a video publicizing blind, self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng’s (陈光诚) extra-judicial detention. It has been reported that, on February 16, 2011, lawyers and other rights defenders planning to meet to discuss Chen’s case were in some cases placed under house arrest to prevent attendance, and, in other cases, seized, detained, and beaten after attending. In at least one case, prominent lawyer Tang Jitian, (唐吉田) has been seized from his apartment and his current whereabouts are unknown.

Reports indicate that, on February 16, 2011, a group of Chen’s supporters planned a lunch to discuss how they could help Chen and his wife. The police reportedly prevented lawyers Li Xiongbing (黎雄兵) and Li Heping (李和平) and legal scholar Xu Zhiyong (许志永) from attending by placing them under house arrest. After leaving the restaurant, Jiang Tianyong (江天勇) was reportedly seized and taken to the police station, where his interrogator grabbed him by the neck and smashed his head against the wall. Jiang has been told he will not be allowed to leave his home without permission until February 19. Teng Biao (滕彪) was also picked up by police on the street and placed under house arrest. Rights defenders Wang Lihong (王荔蕻), Mo Zhixu (莫之许), Chen Tianshi (陈天石), and blogger Liu Di (刘荻) were also prevented from attending the meeting and placed under house arrest. We understand that Li Heping, Li Fangping, Jiang Tianyong remain under harsh surveillance. The swift and severe actions of the police are likely due in part to the fact that these lawyers are well-known rights defenders in Beijing who have previously been targeted by authorities for their work on politically sensitive cases.

Most significantly, two police officers, including a State Security district head, reportedly seized Tang Jitian (唐吉田) at his home that afternoon and took him to a police station in a police car. They also searched his person and his home and seized some of his personal belongings. Reportedly, the police told Tang’s friends that Beijing police officers took Tang from the police station to another, undisclosed location that same evening. It has been impossible to contact Tang Jitian since his detention on the afternoon of 16 February. The Committee is greatly concerned that Tang’s current whereabouts are unknown, and that Tang Jitian may be subjected to similar or worse ill-treatment as his colleague Jiang Tianyong.

Preemptive arrests and violent retaliation against those who would seek to hold the government to the rule of law is a serious abuse of state power The Committee urges the authorities to release Tang Jitian and to stop engaging in violent and abusive practices against peaceful advocates. The Committee also calls on the Beijing Lawyers Association, the Shanghai Bar Association and other Chinese bar groups to investigate these incidents and provide support lawyers who have been targets of physical violence.

Lawyers Call For an End to Extra-Judicial Confinement of Chen Guangcheng and Yuan Weijing

Author: Joy Chia, 212-636-7271
Date: 2011-02-14

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is shocked by reports that rights activist and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng (陈光诚) and his wife Yuan Weijing (袁伟静) were beaten by police and state security officials on February 10, 2011. The Committee calls upon Chinese authorities to investigate this incident, charge the individuals involved, and put an end to ongoing extra-judicial measures being taken against the couple. China has repeatedly committed itself to the rule of law. Continuing to punish a rights defender, and his family, after he has fully served out his sentence is a significant abuse of state power; violent retaliation when the facts of this abuse come to light only further highlights the unlawfulness of such arbitrary punishment and detention.

In 2005, Chen Guangcheng, who is 38-year-old and blind, from Linyi (临沂) City, Shandong Province, documented systemic violence on the part of Linyi municipal authorities in enforcing birth quotas. In retaliation, those same authorities had him arrested and charged with “intentionally damaging property” and “gathering crowds to disturb traffic”; the government contended that the blind activist had led a gang on a destructive rampage through municipal offices and shut down a highway. He was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

On Sept. 9, 2010, Chen was released. However, it has been reported that since that time, Chen, Yuan, and their 5-year-old daughter have been continuously subjected to harsh extra-judicial measures. Reports indicate that they are not allowed to leave their home or to communicate with the outside world, and that visitors have been denied access to the family altogether since October. Moreover, it has been reported that Dongshigu, their home village, has been subject to conditions of martial law, with over 100 hired thugs monitoring all movements in and out of the village. Chen’s home is flooded with lights at night, and security cameras have been installed inside and outside his home.

The incident leading to the most recent beating is apparently in reprisal for releasing a video documenting the harsh conditions of their current house arrest. The hour-long video smuggled out of the couples’ home is the first word from Chen to reach the outside world since his release. The video, which was made available online on February 9, 2011, shows Chen and Yuan speaking about the conditions of their confinement, occasionally turning the camera on the security officers stationed outside their windows. Within a day of the online release of the video, Chen and Yuan were reportedly beaten by police and state security officials.

This incident demonstrates a number of ongoing patterns of abuse of state authority: punishment meted out when activists uncover abuse on the part of local officials; extra-judicial detentions following the completion of criminal punishments; and harassment and abuse towards the families of individuals the state seeks to silence. Human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), though released on a “reprieve” after a conviction for subversion, has been held in secret detention since February 2009, with the exception of a brief reappearance in March and April 2010. His family reportedly fled conditions of ongoing house arrest, and were granted asylum in the United States. Liu Xia (刘霞), the wife of the imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), has reportedly been under house arrest with severely restricted communications since October of 2010.

It is a foundational principle of the rule of law that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. The unlawful detention of Chen and Yuan is also in violation of Article 37 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. When the government engages in such lawless targeting of those it perceives as potential critics, allowing no opportunity for legal challenges, it undermines the rule of law in China.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Calls For a Halt to Recent Physical Attacks on Lawyers by Court Officers

Author: Joy Chia, 212-636-7271
Date: 2011-02-07

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers today calls upon Chinese authorities to investigate and put an end to the recent upswing in physical attacks on lawyers being carried out by officers of the Chinese court system during hearings. China has repeatedly committed itself to the rule of law and the independence of the legal profession. The infliction of bodily harm upon attorneys at court has absolutely no place within the courts of justice; failing to hold those responsible to account fatally undermines the purpose, validity, and impartiality of the court system.

We understand the facts to be as follows: On the morning of January 24, 2011, lawyers Wen Yongquan [文永泉] and Liu Guiying [刘桂英] of the Jiaxu Law Firm [佳旭律师事务所] came to the Daoli District People's Court in Harbin City to defend a client accused of fraud. Rong Jingpeng [荣敬朋], Yuan Ziyi [苑紫毅], Li Hongjie [李宏杰], Zhang Shurui [章舒锐], Hao Shuang [郝爽], and Zheng Song [郑松], other lawyers and interns from the firm, also arrived; when they attempted to attend the hearing, a court officer told them there was no room. When Wen attempted to intervene and Rong began videotaping the proceedings with her phone, the court police attacked both of them. The court police proceeded to confiscate Rong's phone and Wen's legal license, beating the eight lawyers in the process and then detaining them.

Liu and Rong were both pregnant. As a result of the beatings, both were injured; Liu began to bleed and cramp, forcing her to end her pregnancy two days later.

While particularly repugnant, this is not the only such incident reported in recent months. We understand that on December 7, 2010, Beijing lawyers Dong Qianyong [董前勇] and Wang Quanzhang [王全章] were prevented from doing their work in court, and Dong was beaten, in Chang'an District People's Court in Xi'an City (Shaanxi Province). Dong and Wang were acting as criminal defense lawyers for a village leader who was challenging the local government. In another case, on September 2, 2010, Dong was pushed out of the courtroom and beaten severely by several court police officers, after he objected to a security check being carried out on his colleague Zhang Kai.

Physically attacking lawyers with impunity for actions taken as part of their professional functions is contrary to fundamental principles of the rule of law. By placing the lawyers who represent clients against the government in physical fear, such violence can only have a chilling effect on their willingness to fully and zealously represent those clients. Moreover, it runs afoul of foundational human rights, set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the right to the security of one's person, and the right to be free of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Based on these reports, the Committee today sent a letter to the Ministry of Justice, calling upon it to investigate the recent abuses against lawyers. In its letter, the Committee called upon the government to uphold China's existing commitment to the rule of law and to ensure the effective protection of lawyers carrying out their professional functions.

To read the Committee's letter to the Ministry of Justice, please click here.

On Eve of Nobel Ceremony the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Calls for a Halt to Recent Crackdown on Lawyers

Date: 2010-12-09

On the eve of the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony in Oslo, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers calls upon Chinese authorities to halt the harassment of lawyers that has intensified since Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波) was named this year’s recipient. China has repeatedly committed itself to the rule of law and the independence of the legal profession. This day should represent a recommitment to those principles.

Since the Nobel was announced, Chinese lawyers have been harassed and prevented from pursuing their professional duties. Lawyers have had their ability to effectively represent their clients compromised by house arrest and surveillance. In one instance, such surveillance resulted in the lawyer being forced to conduct a client meeting in the presence of police. Other lawyers have been prevented from meeting with their detained clients altogether, in contravention of Chinese law. Lawyers have also been barred from leaving China to attend professional and scholarly conferences, and to participate in legal education and legal exchange programs—all on the grounds that such movements would endanger state security. Numerous lawyers have been put under surveillance and face restrictions on their personal freedoms. Some have been summoned by the police for interrogations, while others have been specifically barred from speaking to the press. Examples of these incidents are included in this chronology.

Based on these reports of harassment and interference with professional functions, the Committee today sent a letter to the Ministry of Justice, calling upon it to investigate the recent crackdowns on lawyers. In its letter, the Committee detailed the extensive violations of lawyers’ rights and ability to represent their clients as accepted under both international and Chinese domestic law. It called upon the government to uphold China’s existing commitment to the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers and ensure the effective protection of lawyers carrying out their professional functions.

Chronology of Events

Interference with Client Representation and Professional Activities

On Oct. 27, 2010, Li Xiongbing (黎雄兵) was initially prevented from leaving his home for a business trip, although he successfully made a later flight.
On Nov. 15, 2010, Li Fangping (李方平) attempted to visit client Zhao Lianhai at the Daxing Detention Center in Beijing. The police on duty told him he would have to contact Zhao by telephone instead, without providing an explanation.
On Nov. 11, 2010, Yuexiu District Public Security Bureau in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province denied the request of Liu Zhengqing (刘正清) to meet with his client, Guo Xianliang (郭贤良), on the grounds that Guo’s case was “special.” Guo was criminally detained on Oct. 29, 2010 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power”by passing out informational flyers regarding Liu Xiaobo and the Peace Prize.
On December 7, 2010, Li Xiongbing (黎雄兵) was forced by local police to resign as acting head of Aizhixing, a prominent Beijing-based AIDS organization, in retaliation for Wan Yanhai’s intention to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.

Lawyers Prevented from Participating in Professional Conferences

On Oct. 30, 2010, Jiang Tianyong (江天勇) and Li Subin (李苏滨) were blocked from leaving the country at Beijing International Airport and Shanghai Pudong International Airport, respectively. The two were attempting to travel to the United States where they had accepted invitations to observe the U.S. mid-term elections and participate in academic exchanges.
On Oct. 30, 2010: Beijing legal scholar Fan Yafeng (范亚峰) was barred from attending a seminar about a case of a fatal car accident at Hebei University. He was detained for 9 hours.
On Nov. 8, 2010, Li Fangping (李方平) was placed under soft detention to prevent him from attending a legal seminar organized by the French government.
On Nov. 9, 2010, Mo Shaoping (莫少平) and legal scholar He Weifang (贺卫方) , were barred at the Beijing airport by police officers from boarding a flight to London, where they were due to take part in a conference organized by the International Bar Association on the independence of lawyers in China.
On Nov. 28, 2010, Liu Xiaoyuan (刘晓原) was prevented from attending a conference at a Tokyo university because his departure would “endanger state security.”

Harassment of Lawyers Through Interrogation, Surveillance, or House Arrest

On Oct. 8, 2010, Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强) was detained for three days and then placed under house arrest.
On Oct. 8, 2010, Li Fangping (李方平) and Li Heping (李和平) were also placed under continuous police surveillance, with officers stationed outside their homes and following them whenever they leave, including to client meetings.
The number of policemen deployed outside the Beijing residence of lawyer and political theorist Zhang Zuhua (张祖桦) was increased on both Oct. 8 and Oct. 10, 2010 Zhang, who was the principal drafter of Charter 08, cannot leave his house without permission, and is accompanied by police wherever he goes.
Ni Wenhua (倪文华)was summoned for repeated police interrogations on Oct. 16 and Oct. 17, 2010.

Reports also indicate that many other lawyers have been put under surveillance and have had their personal movements restricted, including: Liu Xiaobo’s lawyers, Ding Xikui (丁锡奎) and Shang Baojun (尚宝军); Li Baiguang (李柏光); Li Xiongbing (黎雄兵); constitutional scholar Liu Junning (刘军宁); China University of Political Science and Law professor, Teng Biao (滕彪); Zhang Xingshui (张星水) and Zhuang Daohe (庄道鹤). Legal scholars Yu Haocheng (于浩成) and Zhang Zuhua are currently under soft detention at home. Other lawyers, including Pu Zhiqiang and Teng Biao, have been warned by Chinese authorities not to grant any media interviews.

Jerry Cohen on Chen Guangcheng

Date: 2010-11-18

Prof. Jerry Cohen, a CSCL Senior Adviser, discusses the house arrest of blind "barefoot" lawyer, Chen Guangcheng. To view video, click here

Empty Chairs in Oslo Speak Volumes

Date: 2010-11-11

By JEROME A. COHEN AND EVA PILS

The Nobel Peace Prize committee's decision to award the medal to Liu Xiaobo was supposed to shine a spotlight on human rights abuses in China. Instead, Beijing has pulled out all the stops to make the prize about almost anything but human rights. If that tactic succeeds—and if the rest of the world isn't careful, it might—this prize will represent a disappointing lost opportunity.

The committee's purpose ought to be clear as day: Mr. Liu won the prize "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Yet in the weeks since the announcement, Beijing has framed this as an attack on its "sovereignty." It also sparked a debate about commercial interests and diplomacy toward China by cancelling a ministerial trade meeting with Norway and calling upon European countries to boycott the award ceremony or else. More destructively, China's state-run media launched an unprecedented campaign to slander and libel Mr. Liu and intimidate his many supporters by suggesting he's in the pay of the American government and harbors "anti-China" opinions.

In short, Beijing has tried to change the subject in order to distract commentators from human rights problems that Mr. Liu addressed and that the Nobel committee wanted to highlight.

Fortunately, there will soon be another opportunity to get the discussion back on track: the Dec. 10 ceremony at which Mr. Liu would personally receive his medal if he weren't currently imprisoned for 11 years. The best way to cut through Beijing's smokescreen is to focus not only on Mr. Liu but also on why his friends won't be able to attend the ceremony either.

Liu Xia, Mr. Liu's wife, would ordinarily be the guest of honor in his absence. Unfortunately, since announcement of the prize, even though she is not suspected of a crime, she has been subjected to increasingly severe police restraints, making it very difficult to communicate with the outside world. Thus, on Oct. 26, when a foreign journalist asked Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu what Mr. Ma called a "hypothetical question"—whether Liu Xia would be allowed to go to Oslo—Mr. Ma was able confidently to urge journalists to ask her whether she wanted to go.

On Tuesday, the renowned criminal defense lawyer Mo Shaoping and outspoken Peking University law professor He Weifang, both signatories of Charter 08, were prevented from leaving the country. They were on their way to a conference of the International Bar Association in London, scheduled months ahead. They already held November return tickets and had no plans to go to Oslo. Yet the authorities told them they were not allowed to leave, because they "might endanger state security."

Consider also blind "barefoot lawyer" Chen Guangcheng, who has been invited to attend. He probably doesn't even know he is on the guest list. Since his release from prison on Sept. 9 after serving more than four years for "intentionally damaging public property" and "organizing others to block traffic" (his real crime was revealing the local government's massive forced abortions and sterilizations), he and his family have been under extraordinarily fierce extralegal detention. Their impoverished rural farmhouse is at all times encircled by a horde of police officers and hired guards, who have severed all communications, installed security cameras and all-night bright lights, and frequently threatened Mr. Chen as well as would-be visitors. The last any of his friends spoke to him or his wife was in late September.

Hu Jia is another friend of Mr. Liu who will not be able to honor him in Oslo. Mr. Hu is serving a 3½-year prison sentence for "inciting to subvert state power," related to his activism on behalf of the environment, AIDS-related official abuses, persecuted human rights defenders and others. His wife, also an activist, has been warned that upon his release in 2011 the family, which endured illegal harassment before Mr. Hu's detention, will likely be subjected to the same sort of suffocating illegal house arrest that their friends the Chens have long suffered.

Another activist illegally detained in his apartment is former Shanghai housing lawyer Zheng Enchong. He helped expose a corrupt conspiracy between Shanghai officials and private developers who evicted local residents to make way for building projects. It first cost him his lawyer's license. He then was sent to prison for three years, ostensibly for sending abroad "state secrets" but actually because he persisted in advising the dispossessed. He has been holed up by police for most of the last four years and is now strictly confined again after sending out messages supporting Liu Xiaobo.

At least the whereabouts of these activists are known. That is not the case with another unfrocked lawyer who will not be in Oslo on Dec. 10, Gao Zhisheng, one of China's most courageous human-rights defenders, who has been kept under house arrest, harassed, imprisoned, tortured and humiliated since 2006. At present he has literally "been disappeared"—authorities won't say whether he is in jail again and, if so, why; or where he is; or even if he is still alive. And this is not his first disappearance. Earlier this year, after sustained efforts on his behalf by foreign governments, human rights organizations and media, Mr. Gao emerged for one week of limited freedom following 14 months of disappearance. Yet, after contacting his wife and children, who fled to the U.S. last year, and a few friends, he again went missing and there has been no news of him since April 20.

Foreign politicians, diplomats, journalists, business people, academics and rights activists should be asking Beijing why these people and many other admirable Chinese invitees won't be allowed to travel to Norway. Such sunlight might burn off some of the fog the Chinese government has tried to create around its civil and political rights record. There is no better way to answer Beijing's diversionary nationalistic propaganda offensive than to call attention to those empty chairs on Dec. 10.

Mr. Cohen is codirector of New York University School of Law's U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Ms. Pils is associate professor of law at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Condemns the Recent Crackdown on Lawyers and Other Human Rights Defenders in the name of "State Security"

Author: csclawyers@law.fordham.edu
Date: 2010-11-09

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers strongly condemns the Chinese government’s decision to prevent prominent Chinese lawyers, Mo Shaoping (莫少平) and He Weifang (贺卫方), from leaving the People’s Republic of China to attend an international conference. The Committee believes that these lawyers have been blocked from leaving the country because their zealous representation of clients unpopular with the Chinese authorities and for their advocacy of human rights more generally.

On November 9, 2010, Mr. Mo and Mr. He were barred by police officers from boarding a flight to London, where they were due to take part in a conference organized by the International Bar Association (“IBA”) on the independence of lawyers in China. The Committee believes that Mr. Mo and Mr. He were targeted because of their outspoken advocacy for legal reform in China. Mr. Mo is one of China’s leading human rights lawyers and has represented clients, such as political dissidents, journalists and Falun Gong practitioners, unpopular with the Chinese authorities. A signatory to Charter 08 himself, Mr. Mo was not permitted to defend Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, although other lawyers from his firm were allowed to do so. Mr. He, who also signed the Charter 08 petition, is a well-known law professor from Beijing University Law School who has frequently voiced criticisms of China’s judicial system.

Chinese authorities have refused to state why Mr. Mo and Mr. He have been banned from leaving the county. According to media reports, Mr. Mo and Mr. He were stopped from boarding their plane and questioned at the airport for forty minutes by the police. When pressed to give reasons for why Mr. Mo and Mr. He could not leave China, police officers only stated that their trips to the United Kingdom posed “a threat to China’s national security”—which the lawyers believe was an allusion to their being invited by Liu Xiaobo’s wife to attend the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. However, it appears that the IBA’s event had been organized several months ago and was unrelated to Liu Xiaobo’s case.

It is alarming that Mr. Mo and Mr. He are the latest in a growing list of lawyers and other human rights defenders who have been prevented from attending international events under the pretext of ensuring that they did not “endanger national security.” On October 30, 2010, rights defense lawyers Jiang Tianyong (江天勇) and Li Subin (李苏滨) were also blocked from leaving the country at Beijing International Airport and Shanghai Pudong International Airport, respectively. The two lawyers were attempting to travel to the United States where they had accepted invitations to observe the U.S. mid-term elections and participate in academic exchanges.[1]

Targeting and intimidating lawyers because the clients they represent are unpopular with the authorities, or because such lawyers speak out about rights defense, is contrary to the rule of law and the United Nations Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, which China supports, including Articles 16, 18 and 23 of the Basic Principles. By barring these lawyers from leaving the country, China is in breach of Article 13 of the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, to which it is a signatory.

The Committee calls upon the Chinese government to adhere to international principles and ensure that Chinese lawyers are not targeted on account of their rights defense advocacy or their clients, and to protect the freedom of movement of all Chinese citizens.

[1] On July 4, 2010, Zhang Kai, a lawyer who has represented house Christians, was prevented by customs officials from boarding a plane for the United States where he was to attend legal training. On November 5 and 6, 2010, border control officers have also prevented human rights defenders Fang Cao, Wang Jinglong, Duan Qixian and Yu Fangqiang from traveling to a training session on United Nations human rights mechanisms in Geneva, Switzerland.

China Bars Two Rights Advocates From Travel

Date: 2010-11-08
New York Times

BEIJING — Two prominent legal advocates bound for an international law conference in London were blocked from leaving China on Tuesday on vague charges that their departure might endanger national security, the two men said.

Although the men, Mo Shaoping and He Weifang, said that while they were not given explicit reasons for why they were barred from their flight, they suspected that the government feared they would try to attend the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo next month to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

The officers who detained the two men at Beijing’s international airport Tuesday morning said a superior had described their overseas journey as a threat to state security, the men said. “That’s the most imbecilic thing I’ve heard,” Mr. Mo said afterward, adding that he had no intention of traveling to Oslo. “I don’t have a visa for Norway, and I have a ticket to return to Beijing on Nov. 15.”

In recent weeks, the government has demonstrated its resolve to stop Chinese citizens from showing up in Oslo for the ceremony on Dec. 10. To that end, it has kept Mr. Liu’s wife incommunicado in her Beijing apartment and subjected scores of other writers, academics and lawyers to varying degrees of detention or surveillance.

At the same time, it has ramped up pressure on foreign governments, warning them to stay away from the event next month or “bear the consequences,” as Cui Tiankai, China’s vice foreign minister, put it last week.

Mr. Liu, 54, an essayist who is among China’s best known advocates of political reform, is serving an 11-year prison term for his writings, including Charter 08, a manifesto calling for improved human rights, the rule of law and an end to single-party rule.

In addition to using its newfound economic might to warn world leaders away from the ceremony, China has waged an equally vociferous campaign at home to tarnish Mr. Liu’s reputation and delegitimize the award in the eyes of the Chinese people.

After a brief news blackout on the prize, the country’s state-controlled media began rolling out articles and editorials describing it as an insult to the country’s criminal justice system, a ploy to hold back China’s rise and a tactic to subvert the country’s political system. Other commentaries have painted Mr. Liu as a corrupt pawn of Western governments.

It is not entirely clear whether the effort to scare diplomats and other top officials away from the ceremony is working. The warnings have already prompted a handful of European countries, among them Britain, Austria and the Netherlands, to announce they would hew to established protocol and send their Norwegian-based ambassadors.

On the other hand, Germany has said it will send a deputy ambassador. The French government has suggested that European states discuss the possibility of a coordinated approach at a meeting in Brussels this week. “I hope France will be represented at the prize-giving ceremony in spite of Beijing’s warnings,” France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, told French radio on Monday.

Michael C. Davis, a law professor and human rights expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said he thought China’s effort to organize a boycott of the ceremony — like its earlier campaign to dissuade the Norwegian Committee from selecting Mr. Liu — would probably backfire. In fact, he said Beijing’s overall handling of the matter was only drawing more attention to Mr. Liu’s plight and to the country’s checkered human rights record. “The Chinese often unintentionally turn their enemies into heroes,” he said.

Mr. Mo and Mr. He have a good idea why they were kept from boarding their plane Tuesday morning. Their names were on a list of 140 people, purportedly compiled by Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, inviting them to Oslo. Because she is under house arrest and restricted from using the phone or e-mail, there was no way to confirm the letter’s authenticity. But since last week, when it began circulating on the Internet, it has gained widespread attention.

In it, Ms. Liu says she accepts that neither she nor her husband will be allowed to attend the ceremony, so she encourages his “peers and friends” to go in their stead. “I call on the authorities to abide by the law, stop obstructing my daily routine, and respect the requests from both inside and outside the country to release Xiaobo and allow us to once again live a normal life,” the letter reads.

An outspoken advocate of legal reform and a signatory to Charter 08, Mr. Mo was barred from defending Mr. Liu last year, although other lawyers from his firm were allowed to take on the case. At a time of increasing pressure on rights lawyers, he is one of the few to have escaped serious persecution.

Although not a practicing lawyer, Mr. He, his would-be traveling companion, is a prominent legal scholar at Peking University whose frequent critiques of China’s judicial system may have played a role in his recent transfer to an isolated university in Western China.

Both men were scheduled to take part in discussions in London on Wednesday about the difficulties facing China’s independent lawyers. Speaking at a restaurant in Beijing, where they were fielding media calls, the lawyers said the decision to block them from the conference was nonsensical. “This is the Chinese government defacing its own image on the international stage,” Mr. He said.

For link to article, click here

China: House Arrest For Rights Lawyer

Date: 2010-11-04

by Edward Wong, New York Times

A prominent rights lawyer who was released in September after years in prison remains under house arrest in his hometown in Shandong Province and is not allowed to receive visitors, Human Rights in China, an advocacy group, said Wednesday. The lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, is a vocal critic of government policies, especially of forced sterilizations or abortions by local officials trying to enforce adherence to the one-child policy. Mr. Chen was held under house arrest for one year starting in 2005, then was imprisoned for four years on criminal convictions. Human Rights in China said no one, not even Mr. Chen’s mother, had been allowed to visit Mr. Chen, who is blind, or his wife, Yuan Weijing, since early O

China: US Should Adopt Principled China Policy

Date: 2010-10-21
Press Release

China: US Should Adopt Principled China Policy
Nine Groups Urge Action Prior to US-China Summit

(New York, October 21, 2010) – American policy toward China should reflect a more principled, high-profile approach to human rights in China, said a group of human rights advocates and China experts in a UletterU to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The letter was sent by Amnesty International, the Foreign Policy Initiative, Freedom House, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the International Campaign for Tibet, Project 2049, Reporters Without Borders, and the Uighur American Association.

The letter applauds President Barack Obama and Secretary Clinton for the support shown to the October 2010 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese government critic Liu Xiaobo, but urges Clinton to take a series of steps prior to the US-China summit, tentatively scheduled for January 2011, between Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao. Specific recommendations include:

· Reinforcing the commitments made in Clinton's statement on Liu’s Nobel victory by raising the cases of those who have been harassed by virtue of their association with Liu Xiaobo or Charter ’08, and by enlisting the assistance of other Cabinet members who meet regularly with Chinese officials to raise human rights concerns;

· Reaching out to the Chinese people with messages of support for universally-recognized human rights as a key element of productive US-China relations; and

· Making a specific and public effort to meet in Beijing and Washington with Chinese, Uighur, and Tibetan democracy and human rights defenders, and ordinary Chinese citizens.

The letter notes the Secretary’s recent comments on the importance of human rights and freedoms, in which she stressed the need to support human rights advocates, and that “when fundamental freedoms need a champion, people turn to [the US]…not just to engage but to lead.”

“Secretary Clinton has taken an important step towards overcoming her comments last year that human rights ‘shouldn’t interfere’ in the US-China relationship,” said Sophie Richardson, acting Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But that momentum has to translate into specific policies and practices in order to be more than just rhetoric.”

To read the October 2010 Human Rights Watch letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/node/93785U

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on China, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/en/asia/chinaU

Liu Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Date: 2010-10-08
New York Times

Nobel Peace Prize Given to Jailed Chinese Dissident

New York Times, October 8, 2010

by Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield

BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his activism, has won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”

Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is serving an 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 300 miles from Beijing.

He is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own governments, after the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991, and the German pacifist, Carl von Ossietzky, in 1935.

By awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.

In a move that in retrospect appears to have been counterproductive, a senior Chinese official had warned the Norwegian committee’s secretary that giving the prize to Mr. Liu would adversely affect relations between the two countries.

The committee, in announcing the prize Friday, noted that China, the world’s second biggest economy, should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

But it chastised the government for ignoring basic rights guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and in the international conventions to which Beijing is a party. “In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China’s citizens,” committee members said, adding, “China’s new status must entail increased responsibility.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a “desecration” of the Peace Prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations.

“The Nobel Committee giving the Peace Prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”

Headlines about the award were nowhere to be found in the Chinese media or on the country’s main Internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo (pronounced Liew Show Boh) on CNN, which reach only luxury compounds and hotels in China, were blacked out throughout the evening. Mobile phone users reported not being able to transmit text messages containing his name in Chinese.

But on government-monitored microblogs like Sina.com, which regularly blocks searches for his name, the news still generated nearly 6,000 comments within an hour of the announcement.

Given that he has no access to a telephone, it was unlikely that Mr. Liu would immediately learn of the news, his wife, Liu Xia, said. On Friday night, dozens of foreign reporters gathered outside the couple’s building in Beijing but they were prevented from entering by the police, who posted a sign saying the complex residents “politely refused” to be interviewed. His wife was also barred from leaving her apartment.

Given his imprisonment, Mr. Liu is not expected to accept the prize in person. The award includes a gold medal, a diploma and the equivalent of $1.5 million dollars.

The prize is an enormous psychological boost for China’s beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Community Party. Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles drawn.

“If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist and fellow dissident who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.

His most recent arrest in December 2008 came a day before a reformist manifesto he helped craft began circulating on the Internet. The petition, Charter ’08, demanded that China’s rulers guarantee civil liberties, judicial independence and the kind of political reform that would ultimately end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

“For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom,” his wife said in an interview on Wednesday.

An inexhaustible writer, poet and piquant social commentator, Mr. Liu was among the first of his generation to return to college after Culture Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when schools were shuttered and intellectuals were banished to the countryside. In a book of dialogues he published under a pseudonym with the popular writer Wang Shuo, Mr. Liu later described those years as a “temporary emancipation from the education process,” but ultimately found them deeply disturbing for the cruelty they inspired. In one passage, he recalled taunting an old man suspected of sympathizing with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had been defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist rebels. The abuse, he said, brought the man to tears. “In that era, when people were not treated as human, we were all guilty,” Mr. Liu said.

After graduating from the Chinese department at Jilin University, Mr. Liu enrolled at Beijing Normal University, where he was first a doctoral student and then a teacher. It was in the mid-1980s that he burst to fame for rousing lectures and incisive works of literary criticism that demanded an honest reckoning of the historical excesses under Mao. His writings were so bracing that school officials nearly denied him his doctoral degree.

In 1988, he left China for a series of speaking engagements in Norway, Hawaii and New York. It was in the spring of 1989, while a visiting scholar at Columbia University, that thousands of students began occupying Tiananmen Square, the ceremonial heart of the nation, with their calls for democracy and an end to official corruption. Mr. Liu later says he hesitated — he almost turned back during a change of planes in Tokyo — but returned to Beijing that May as demonstrations spread across the country, paralyzing the leadership in Beijing.

In early June, as it became apparent the military would clear the square by force, Mr. Liu and three other well-known intellectuals staged a 72-hour hunger strike as a show of solidarity that he later said was necessary to earn their trust as the movement lurched toward a violent end. In the early morning hours of June 4, as the army closed in, the men pried a stolen rifle from the hands of a distraught student and negotiated with military commissars to allow the protesters to safely exit the square.

Over the next few days as the crackdown began in earnest and many protest organizers fled China, Mr. Liu was arrested and later castigated in the state press as a traitorous “black hand” who had helped orchestrate what the government termed a counter-revolutionary rebellion.

After his release in 1991, Mr. Liu was stripped of his teaching job but he continued to gather petitions pressing for democracy, human rights and the reassessment of the government’s verdict on the Tiananmen protests. In 1995, his unbowed activism brought another arrest leading to another eight-month detention and in 1996, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for a series of essays that criticized the government and called for an end to official corruption.

In those days, Mr. Liu bicycled across the city to the compounds where foreigners worked and lived to fax off his writings to overseas journals.

Zhang Zuhua, a former Communist Youth League member who later played a pivotal role in drafting Charter ’08, said Mr. Liu was a solitary advocate in the 1990s, when fear, exile and the pursuit of self-enrichment silenced most Chinese intellectuals.

“While others were researching the same problems from a theoretical or policy standpoint, he was actively protesting and actually doing things,” Mr. Zhang said.

When he emerged from prison in 1999, the Internet had taken hold in China and was beginning to transform the nature of public discourse. At first reluctant to use a computer, Mr. Liu quickly became a prolific commentator on overseas Web sites, later calling the Internet “God’s gift to China.” Over the years, he published more than 1,000 articles.

Inspired by a number of documents, including the United States Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Charter ‘08 was in some ways a culmination of Mr. Liu’s search for pragmatic ways to push for political reform in China. Although he initially heeded his wife’s pleas not to join the drafting, he later immersed himself in the three-year effort, revising it numerous times and working to convince more than 300 people — intellectuals, workers and party members — to add their names.

In its brief life on the Internet, the petition gathered some 10,000 signatures before censors stymied its spread. In the Internet crackdown that followed, scores of blogs were shut down, the initial 300 signatories were interrogated and Mr. Liu was taken to an undisclosed location, where he spent nearly a year cut off from his wife and lawyer.

At a two-hour trial last December, the government cited Charter ‘08 and nine essays he had written to argue that Mr. Liu had exceeded the right to free expression by “openly slandering and inciting others to overthrow our country’s state power,” according to the verdict. Mr. Liu countered that he had simply advocated the gradual and nonviolent change in governance.

In a statement he gave to the court before his sentencing on Christmas Day, he said he held no grudge against those who sought to silence him and he even thanked his captors for treating him with dignity.

“I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom,” he said. “China will eventually become a country of rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict — one that can stand the test of history.”

Breaking point? The persecution of 'barefoot lawyer' Chen Guangcheng adds to China's miserable record

Date: 2010-09-14
South China Morning Post

How much persecution can Chinese law reformers, political activists and religious practitioners endure? How much suffering is the Chinese government willing to inflict upon them in the name of stability and harmony? Why do "rights lawyers" like Gao Zhisheng and Zheng Enchong , intellectuals like Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia , and millions of adherents of "house churches" and the Falun Gong resist a regime that has fostered remarkable economic development and lifted several hundred million people out of poverty?

Last week's release from prison of the blind "barefoot lawyer" Chen Guangcheng raises such questions again, especially since the 38-year-old Chen, after completing his 51-month sentence, has merely been transferred from one type of detention to another. His home - a humble farmhouse in Dongshigu village, a literally dirt-poor area of Shandong province - is not his castle, but his prison.

For seven months before police detained him in March 2006, his home had been under illegal around-the-clock siege by dozens of police officers and their henchmen. Their job was not only to prevent Chen and his wife, Yuan Weijing , from leaving the village but also to prevent lawyers, journalists and admirers of the already famous Chen from entering. When he once managed to escape to Beijing, they brought him back by force and thrashed lawyers who followed. This police harassment continued against his wife for most of the period Chen was imprisoned, and now it has been strengthened.

How long will this lawless nightmare last? The local government has been determined to break the will of this idealistic couple. It denied Chen's family the regular monthly prison visits authorised by law. Soon after detention he was badly beaten. When, in 2007, Chen was awarded Asia's prestigious Magsaysay prize for emergent leadership, Yuan was not permitted to accept it for him. Beginning in 2008, when he first suffered the chronic diarrhoea that has left him emaciated and ill, the government denied him adequate treatment and medical parole, raising suspicions that it might be seeking to permanently incapacitate him. Last year, Yuan's minders told her that they had already spent 15 million yuan (HK$17.2 million) on restricting the family and had set aside 50 million more.

What had Chen done to deserve all this? After two farcical "trials", this son of poor peasants was convicted on trumped-up charges of organising a crowd to block traffic and damaging public property. His real offence, however, was to attempt to use the legal system to right some of the wrongs of rural government. After training, like many other blind Chinese, to be a massage therapist, Chen decided to devote himself instead to stopping the official discrimination against the disabled that he experienced. Yet he received no help from any of the four lawyers in Yinan county, who needed good relations with local government and saw no money in such cases. Even the Yinan office of the China Disabled Persons' Federation refused to help him enforce the country's anti-discrimination law, since that office depended on local government.

So Chen decided to take advantage of the Chinese legal system's openness to non-professional participation in litigation and soon became well known for helping the helpless gain access to the courts. He tried to hold local officials accountable for various violations of national tax, anti-discrimination and criminal laws. Initially successful, Chen gradually met resistance from judges caught between national law and local officials on whom they too were dependent for funding and promotions. A 2002 cover story in Newsweek led to a US State Department tour of American legal institutions in 2003. That enabled me to befriend this young, charismatic figure, but it also fed the fires of official resentment against him at home.

In September that year, while teaching at Tsinghua University, I invited Chen to Beijing to meet several legal educators in an effort to enlist support for his desire to train the hundreds of "barefoot lawyers" he thought necessary to provide legal services in Yinan county alone. We also bought him good handbooks instructing laymen how to navigate the complexities of Chinese laws and judicial procedures.

The next month, my wife and I spent several days in Dongshigu. We met his neighbours, interviewed his "clients" - a sad but hopeful group of people with various disabilities - and made plans for training "barefoot lawyers". I was impressed by Chen's evident popularity with both clients and other villagers, many of whom were later prevented from testifying at his trials. I was also impressed by the well-thumbed, heavily-underlined pages of the handbooks we had acquired only weeks earlier. They had been read to him by his wife and brother, who had both become involved in his amateur legal aid operation.

Unfortunately, our plans were overtaken by a vicious provincial campaign to fulfil centrally allocated birth control targets. Thousands of Shandong women who sought to elude forced abortion and sterilisation, together with their families, were subjected to brutal abuses by local officials. Many victims asked Chen for help, and he became increasingly depressed by his inability to persuade either officials or judges to halt the violations of the country's family planning and criminal justice laws.

The last time I saw Chen, in the summer of 2005, he was nervous, chain-smoking and wan from insomnia. Whatever the risks to himself, he was desperate to use the internet and foreign journalists to expose the abuses that the courts refused to handle. And he did so - too effectively for his own safety.

"What do the party leaders want me to do, go into the streets and lead a riot?" he asked me rhetorically. "Why can't I use the legal system?" The Communist Party answered by unjustly convicting him of the kind of protest he always avoided. Although the central authorities belatedly condemned Shandong's population abuses, it was the whistle-blower who was punished.

Last week, on release from prison, Chen told friends he had not changed at all. Will endless house arrest finally break him?

Jerome Cohen is co-director of New York University School of Law's US-Asia Law Institute and adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations

China's blind activist lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, released from prison

Date: 2010-09-09
CS Monitor

By Peter Ford, Staff writer / September 9, 2010

Beijing

Blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng was freed Thursday after four years in jail, to find the Chinese civil rights movement he helped pioneer weak, but lawyers still in the fight.

Mr. Chen, a self-taught “barefoot lawyer,” earned worldwide fame for calling attention to forced abortions and sterilizations as part of China’s one-child policy, and for helping people seek legal redress for official injustices.

He and two like-minded lawyers were jailed, however, and the Chinese government has since cracked down hard on lawyers pursuing human rights or public interest litigation.

“There has been an overall setback in the rights protection movement” in recent years says Stephanie Balme, a visiting law professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “It is much harder today to take any action on sensitive issues” such as human rights, food safety, religious freedom, AIDS victims, and a range of other causes, she says.

“It is rare now that lawyers are jailed, like Chen Guangcheng, but government repression of human rights activists and lawyers is worse than four years ago and more common,” says Jiang Tianyong, a former lawyer who was disbarred last year.

A generation of Chinese civil rights activists

Chen was a leader of the first generation of Chinese civil rights activists, encouraged by signs that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wanted to widen avenues of legal redress for injustice so as to dampen popular discontent.

The government changed tack, however, and in 2006 Chen was arrested. A prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng was also jailed, as was another member of his firm Guo Feixiong, who had represented villagers alleging official corruption. Mr. Gao has now disappeared, and is believed to be in government hands. Mr. Guo remains in prison.

Last year the authorities “shifted from individual repression of lawyers to collective punishment,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong based researcher for Human Rights Watch. Around 20 of the country’s most outspoken civil rights lawyers were threatened with the loss of their professional licenses.

Mr. Jiang was among them; he had successfully defended a Tibetan monk accused of concealing weapons. “We took sensitive cases and we did not listen to the Beijing Judicial Bureau’s orders” he says, explaining the trouble he ran into.

Punishment for lawyers

Eventually only Jiang and four others did not get their licenses renewed. But almost all of the rest were forced out of the law firms they had worked for, he says.

Instead of arresting lawyers, the government now restrains them in more subtle ways, explains Jiang. The authorities do not renew their licenses, communist party committees have been set up in law firms to keep a closer eye on them, and law firm partners are pressured to fire recalcitrant members of their firms.

Sometimes the authorities simply close law practices that do not bow to their demands. The Beijing-based An Hui firm that refused to sack Tang Jitian, a lawyer who lost his license last April after representing members of the outlawed Falun Gong religious movement, failed its annual government check and is no longer allowed to operate.

“These are all very effective measures” says Jiang. “Before they would just warn us and if we weren’t afraid we’d take the case anyway. That’s not true any more.”

Less room to maneuver

At the same time, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to use the courts to advance their social causes “have less room for maneuver” than they once did, says Prof. Balme.

They could be forgiven for feeling intimidated: Gongmeng, a prominent group with strong international support, was closed last year on tax grounds after taking up the cases of victims of poisoned milk powder. A well-known womens’ legal aid center was expelled from Peking University, its host for many years. And the head of Aizhixing, an NGO advocating AIDS patients’ rights, fled China earlier this year saying it had become impossible to work here.

“The landscape is much tougher for legal activists,” says Mr. Bequelin. “But it is not dead. A new generation is coming up.”

Ordinary citizens’ awareness of their rights is growing, adds Xu Zhiyong, the former head of Gongmeng, and “more lawyers are standing up to defend justice” he says. “Society is making progress.”

“If violations of peoples’ rights continue to be common, even if the government keeps repressing lawyers, new ones will join the group” of rights activists, predicts Jiang. “I haven’t seen many give up.”

Article available at http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2010/0909/China-s-blind-activist-lawyer-Chen-Guangcheng-released-from-prison

Prisoner in his own home

Date: 2010-06-10

Jerome A. Cohen and Yu-Jie Chen

While hundreds of thousands flood the World Expo in Shanghai every day, former lawyer Zheng Enchong is forbidden to even leave his apartment in the city. His home has been his prison since his official prison sentence ended in June 2006.

Around the clock, 12 guards, including uniformed police, plain-clothes public security officials and their hired hands, take turns manning the outer gate, building entrance and hallway outside Zheng's apartment. Strategically posted surveillance cameras ensure that no one in the vicinity can escape police eyes. Zheng, who is 60, only leaves when summoned by police and has been summoned at least 77 times since 2006 for interrogations that are intimidating and occasionally physically abusive. His home has been searched 11 times, and five computers have been confiscated. He generally has no internet access, and his phone is monitored when not disconnected.

His wife is allowed daily trips to market but is always followed. When police prevent her from going out during "sensitive" times, they shop for the family! After authorities made it clear that Zheng's teenage daughter had no future in China, she fled to the US.

Almost all journalists and foreigners who try to visit Zheng have been intercepted, as one of us was four years ago. Yet, to our surprise, we managed to see him on May 29, after a failed attempt the day before. We were the first foreigners to see him in 17 months.

The previous day we had been stopped at the entrance by a plain-clothes policeman. He nervously blocked us with crowd control tape, told us to leave and called another guard. When asked why we could not see Zheng, the policemen mumbled "something has come up on that floor today" and later "something has come up in the public security bureau today". They did not know how to respond. When we repeatedly asked their legal basis for isolating Zheng, they became annoyed and said it was none of our business. After some time, the standoff ended when they told us to come back at 10am the next day.

We arrived the next morning with little hope, and at first a new group of guards again told us to leave. But persistence eventually paid off, and the police, perhaps worried about bad publicity during expo, recorded the details of our US and Taiwan travel documents, sought higher instructions and finally let us in.

We were warmly welcomed by Zheng, his wife and her brother, who lives down the hall. Zheng seemed buoyed by our visit and spoke passionately about his career and plight. During the Cultural Revolution, after fighting on the losing side in a struggle between Red Guard factions, he was exiled to the countryside for 11 years before returning to a variety of factory and government jobs. He began to study law in 1985 and passed the lawyers' exam two years later. In 1994, after Zheng started representing clients who claimed they had been illegally evicted from their residences, the authorities began to delay the required annual renewal of his lawyer's licence, and in 2001 the Shanghai Judicial Bureau refused to renew it outright.

Nevertheless, Zheng continued to advise evicted people. After exposing a major real estate scandal involving corruption among a well known Shanghai tycoon and high-up Communist Party leaders and their families, he was detained in May 2003 and convicted of "providing state secrets to an overseas organisation", the New York-based NGO, Human Rights in China. Although the alleged "state secrets" concerned a large-scale public protest and an "internal" government magazine's report on an eviction case, the prosecution was an apparent retaliation for Zheng's exposure of the scandal. The court sentenced him to three years' imprisonment and one year's subsequent deprivation of political rights.

Zheng's illegal house arrest began immediately after his June 2006 release from prison, and no end is in sight. The government does not even offer a fig leaf to justify his confinement.

Despite China's legislative and institutional progress, in reality no theoretical remedy is available to free him. Plainly the government fears Zheng. The articles on land issues and human rights that he still occasionally circulates through surreptitious means suggest why. If Zheng were free, he would undoubtedly write, say and do more.

Zheng is luckier than the "disappeared" former lawyer Gao Zhisheng , and he is happy not to have been forced abroad like his own defence lawyer, Guo Guoting. Yet he is restrained more than the "rights lawyers" who, despite daily harassments, remain on the street, albeit no longer licensed to practise. Will the blind but dynamic "barefoot lawyer" Chen Guangcheng undergo similar unlawful punishment when he is released from his long prison sentence this autumn?

As we left his apartment, Zheng walked us to the hallway where two guards were seated on a couch. Near them, incongruously, lay a Bible. Zheng, a devout Christian like many "rights lawyers", explained to us: "I gave them the Bible to read; otherwise it would be too boring for them to stay here such a long time. It is my faith."

Professor Jerome A. Cohen is co-director of NYU School of Law's US-Asia Law Institute and adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Yu-Jie Chen is a Taiwan lawyer and research fellow of US-Asia Law Institute. See also www.usasialaw.org

Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Calls for Information on Gao Zhisheng

Date: 2010-05-06

In an open letter sent to Minister Wu Aiying (吴爱英) on May 6, 2010, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers called upon the Ministry of Justice of the People's Republic of China to investigate and provide information on Gao Zhisheng, who has once again been disappeared from his home.

In February 2009, Mr. Gao was reportedly taken away by police and no information about his whereabouts or safety were provided, until he resurfaced in late March 2010, when he confirmed he was in Shanxi province. He was later returned to his Beijing apartment in April 2009. According to reports, Mr. Gao has again disappeared with no information on his whereabouts, raising concerns that he has once again been detained and mistreated.

The Committee expressed its deep concern that Mr. Gao has been disappeared again. In light of Mr. Gao's assertions that he was tortured during his September 2007 detention and his reticence regarding his treatment by the authorities during his 14-month long disappearance, the Committee expressed its belief that Mr. Gao is in great danger and urged the Ministry of Justice to verify Mr. Gao's personal well-being and safety.

The detention and harassment of Mr. Gao as a consequence of his professional decision to take on clients in politically sensitive cases has a chilling effect on the entire legal profession, and undermines the development of a professional and independent bar and the rule of law in China. It is also inconsistent with international standards on the independence of lawyers.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School (http://www.leitnercenter.org). It is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

Human Rights lawyer disappears, again

Date: 2010-04-30

Gao Zhisheng, a prominent human rights lawyer who returned to his Beijing home earlier this month after being held in secret detention for more than a year, has disappeared again after enjoying just days of limited freedom, according to friends.

Gao was allowed back to his Beijing apartment on April 6, some 15 months after he’d been dragged from his family home in Shaanxi province by unidentified police, who provided no explanation for the detention.

He was seen leaving his apartment sometime between April 9-12, and getting into a vehicle parked outside his building. Neighbors told Gao’s friends that he gave leftovers away to neighbors before he was taken away by several men. He was carrying just a backpack when he was led away.

Li Heping, a fellow lawyer who is close to Gao, says that he was taken to Urumqi, where he hoped to visit with his wife’s father, who lives in the capital of Xinjiang, in China’s far northwest. Gao’s wife, son and daughter made a daring escape from China in January, 2009, with the help of the Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual group outlawed by the government, slipping from Yunnan province, in China’s southwest, through Laos and on to Thailand, where they were granted permission to emigrate to the United States shortly after. Gao was detained weeks later.

In an interview some 36 hours after returning to his Beijing apartment with this reporter, a human rights lawyer and two Western diplomats, Gao said he was planning to travel to Urumqi in a few days to see his in-laws, who he said were like his own parents.

Gao’s father-in-law says that Gao was brought to his house by four police officers after arriving in the city, but spent just one night there before police took away again. His father-in-law called Li on April 21 to say Gao was to board a plane at 4:30 to return to Beijing.

Gao had promised to call his father-in-law after returning home, but there was no word, said Li, who went to the Beijing apartment twice to look for him. Li added that Gao’s father-in-law told him that he’d not slept the whole night after learning that the human rights lawyer had disappeared again. Li says Gao’s mobile phone stopped working after he arrived in Beijing on April 6.

LI says he has no idea why Gao was detained again after his release, which came after a barrage of international pressure from foreign governments, human rights organizations and the international media, pressuring the Chinese to provide information about the condition and location of Gao, who was never legally charged with any crimes during his 15 months in captivity.

When asked if he’d called the police to ask about Gao’s whereabouts, Li shrugged and said, “I didn’t call because I didn’t know who to call.”

Gao, a former coal miner, soldier, self-trained lawyer, Christian and party member, he was once recognised by the Ministry of Justice as one of the mainland's top 10 lawyers for his pro bono work.

However, he ran into trouble in 2004 after investigating the persecution of members of the Falun Gong. Gao was deeply moved after he uncovered the brutality that was being used against the members of the group, which led him to renounce his membership in the Communist Party.

He was sentenced to prison in 2006 for 'inciting subversion' after writing a series of open letters to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, accusing the government of persecuting and torturing Falun Gong practitioners. Gao lost his licence to practise law and his law firm was shut down.

He was given a suspended sentence in December that same year, after which things got worse for the whole family. Gao, his wife Geng He, daughter Geng Ge and younger son Gao Tianyu, were placed under constant surveillance by security apparatus. Their movements were restricted and they suffered repeated abuse, with even Gao's wife and daughter, who was just 12 at the time, being roughed up by the police. For a period, police even moved into their apartment.

In September 2007, Gao published a personal account of his torture. The article, titled 'Dark Night, Dark Hood, and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia', detailed horrible beatings, electric shocks to his genitals, toothpicks being stuck in his penis and having lit cigarettes held up to his eyes for extended periods, causing temporary blindness.

As the first anniversary of his disappearance approached, there was an international outcry for information about his condition and whereabouts. The Chinese government made a flurry of vague statements, but its unwillingness to give a concrete answer lead to fears that Gao--who was brutally tortured in 2007--had been subjected to severe psychological or physical abuse that made it impossible for him to be shown in public. Some feared even worse.

Chinese officials may have thought that returning him to Beijing would end the interest in his case, says Li, the lawyer, but the opposite was the case. “They discovered after Gao returned to Beijing that he became the focus of local and international attention,” he said. “They’re afraid.”

When asked who was making decisions regarding the treatment of Gao, he would only say that it was at a level higher than China’s security apparatus.

“The party leaders have widely diverging views on how Gao should be dealt with,” he said. “They’re very conflicted.”

During his meeting with this reporter, Gao asked that he not be quoted regarding his treatment while in captivity, or his political views saying, “We’re talking as friends--if this is reported, I’ll disappear again.”

“I don’t want to say much more,” he said. “I hope that this time, my resumption of contact with my family will be for a bit longer.”

Yet, he seemed quite torn, saying he was frustrated by a need to ease his family’s pain and wanting to speak his conscience.

Despite obviously knowing that his apartment was tapped by Chinese security agents, and saying that the police had threatened the possibility of forcibly sending him to a third country, if he spoke to the media, the human rights defender was quite outspoken during the conversation, seemingly contradicting statements made the day before in a Beijing teahouse with the Associated Press, in which he was quoted as saying that he had given up activism.

Sitting in his Beijing apartment, he appeared in good spirits. However, he was clearly concerned about his family, who he said was having problems in the United States, where things had not turned out as well as they’d hoped. He was particularly concerned about his daughter Gege, 16, who was hospitalized recently for psychological problems, and Tianyu, 6, who he said was also suffering from being separated from his father.

He also appeared saddened by memories of his family left behind in his apartment. When asked about a child’s stick figures penciled on the wall in a small room behind him, he smiled brightly, one of the few times he didn’t look serious, and said they were drawn by Tian Yu. He confided to a friend the night that in his first night back in his apartment that he had placed his son’s shoes beside his bed to make him feel less lonely.

Two Beijing Lawyers' Licenses Unreasonably Revoked; Rights to Criminal Defense Infringed in Court

Date: 2010-04-21

On 12 April 2010, Beijing lawyers Tang Jitian (唐吉田) and Liu Wei (刘巍) received a notice from the Beijing Municipal Justice Bureau informing them that an administrative punishment to permanently revoke their legal practice licenses, on the grounds that they had disturbed the order of the court while defending a Falun Gong practitioner, will be imposed on them. We, the undersigned organizations and professional associations, fear that Mr. Tang and Ms. Liu have been targeted because of their representation of clients unpopular with the Chinese government. Targeting lawyers in retaliation for activities undertaken as part of their professional duties violates Chinese law and international standards.

Citing Article 49(1), Clause 6, of the PRC Law on Lawyers, the Beijing Municipal Justice Bureau ordered the revocation of Tang’s and Liu’s licenses, accusing them of “disturbing the order of the court and interfering with normal litigation” during the trial of a case on 27 April 2009, in Luzhou City (泸州), Sichuan Province (四川省), involving a Falun Gong practitioner accused of “using a cult organisation to undermine the implementation of the laws of the state” (利用邪教组织破坏国家法律实施罪).

According to the two lawyers, the presiding judge interrupted them more than ten times during the presentation of their defense statements for the accused Falun Gong practitioner during the 27 April 2009, trial at the Luzhou City Intermediate Court.

According to Tang and Liu, the presiding judge also ignored the lawyers’ requests to stop a person sitting in the public gallery from video-recording the court proceedings. The two lawyers, therefore, felt unable to continue their defense for their clients, noting that the “Court Rules of the People’s Courts of the People’s Republic of China” (《人民法院法庭规则》) had been contravened. Article 9, Clause 1, of the Court Rules states “Members of the public sitting in the public gallery must respect the following requirements of discipline, they must not make audio-recordings or video-recordings or take pictures.”

According to Article 36 of the PRC Law on Lawyers, “The defense statements of a lawyer appointed as a legal representative or criminal defense lawyer and his right to engage in criminal defense are safeguarded in accordance with the law.” Article 37 (Clauses 1 and 2) continues “the personal rights of a lawyer engaged in practicing law shall not be infringed upon. The representation and defense statements presented in court by a lawyer shall not be subject to legal prosecution, except for statements that compromise national security, maliciously defame others, or seriously disrupt the court order.” International principles similarly protect the rights of lawyers to discharge their professional responsibilities. Article 16 of the UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers (1990) similarly requires “(g)overnments [to] ensure that lawyers (a) are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference; …and (c) shall not suffer, or be threatened with, prosecution or administrative, economic or other sanctions for any action taken in accordance with recognized professional duties, standards and ethics.”

During the Luzhou trial, the presiding judge failed to protect Tang’s and Liu’s rights to provide a criminal defense by repeatedly interrupting them, and by neglecting to prevent a person recording the court proceedings, in violation of Court Rules. It was under this duress that Tang and Liu chose to leave the proceedings.

We, the undersigned organizations and professional associations are deeply concerned about the Beijing Municipal Justice Bureau’s intent to revoke Tang’s and Liu’s licenses to practice and call for an investigation into why this sanction is being imposed. The decision to revoke these lawyers’ licenses in the context of a trial during which they were unable to do their jobs appears to be politically motivated. Targeting lawyers who take on politically unpopular cases not only violates the domestic legal standards but also international laws and principles.

We remain concerned about restrictions imposed on other lawyers in recent months. In 2009, Beijing lawyer Jiang Tianyong’s (江天勇) legal practice license was suspended, and as of April 2010, at least six Beijing lawyers have still not had their licenses renewed following the annual inspection of lawyers’ licenses in mid-2009. The threat to permanently revoke Tang Jitian’s and Liu Wei’s licenses to practice law and the passage in April 2010 of new rules providing for administrative punishment of lawyers and law firms that include broad and vague new provisions appears to represent further efforts to restrict the independence of the legal profession in China, and undermines China’s commitment to the rule of law.

Co-signed by:
[Listed in alphabetical order]
China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group
Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers
The Committee for Human Rights Protection of Taipei Bar Association

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Calls for the Renewal of Beijing Lawyers' Licenses

Date: 2010-02-18

In an open letter sent to Minister Wu Aiying (吴爱英) on February 17, 2010, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers called upon the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China to investigate the on-going non-renewal of lawyers’ licenses. The Committee believes that these Beijing lawyers lost their licenses to practice law because they represent clients who are unpopular with the authorities, or because of their bar association activities and rights defense advocacy.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers had previously written to Minister Wu about this issue in May 2009, but according to reports, these Beijing lawyers have still not had their licenses renewed: Li Jinsong (李劲松), Liu Wei (刘巍), Jiang Tianyong (江天勇), Tang Jitian (唐吉田), Tong Zhaoping (童朝平), Wen Haibo (温海波), Yang Huiwen (杨慧文), and Zhang Lihui (张立辉).

These lawyers have gone repeatedly to both the Beijing Lawyers Association and the Beijing Judicial Bureau, seeking the renewal of their licenses. Not only have their licenses not been renewed, they have also been unable to obtain any information as to the reasons why. There have also been reports of harassment and intimidation. For example, when Zhang Lihui (张立辉), Yang Huiwen (杨慧文), Tang Jitian (唐吉田), and Liu Wei (刘巍) went to the Beijing Judicial Bureau on December 30, 2009 to inquire about their licenses, they were barred from entering the Bureau’s offices. It was only after they complained to the police that they were able to speak to a member of the Bureau’s staff.

In its letter, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers called upon Minister Wu to investigate why these lawyers’ licenses to practice have not been renewed and to intercede on their behalf to secure renewal of their licenses. The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers emphasized the need for Chinese authorities to adhere to the rule of law and uphold their obligations under relevant international and domestic laws.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. It is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

One Year Later, Gao Zhisheng, Human Rights Lawyer, Remains Missing

Date: 2010-02-05

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of Gao Zhisheng, one of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers. He has not been heard from since February 4, 2009, when he was reportedly taken from his home by policemen and thugs.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers remains deeply concerned about the disappearance of Mr. Gao, and the continuing reluctance of the Chinese Government to disclose any information about Mr. Gao’s whereabouts or physical well-being. Throughout the past year, the Chinese government has repeatedly ignored calls to produce photographs and videos of Mr. Gao, to provide access to him, or to even confirm that he is living. Most recently, in January 2010, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, informed reporters simply that Mr. Gao “is where he should be.”

Mr. Gao is just one of many lawyers who have been detained, harassed and imprisoned as a result of their professional decision to take on clients in politically sensitive cases. As interested lawyers outside of China seeking to strengthen the role of lawyers in China and to promote their independence, we urge the Chinese government to investigate the disappearance of Gao Zhisheng, verify his whereabouts and confirm his physical safety.

Obama, Human Rights and China

Date: 2009-11-12

Flame of Conscience

Sunday will mark President Barack Obama's first visit to China. Will he be stricken by Marco Polo-itis? The Great Wall and the Forbidden City can be mesmerizing. But so too can Obama, especially if allowed to speak freely on Chinese television.

President Obama will have only three days in China and will visit Shanghai and Beijing. He confronts some tough choices, not only between meetings and sightseeing but also in choosing among the unprecedented number of difficult issues on his potential agenda. Climate change? World financial crisis? Tariff war and currency revaluation? North Korean nuclear weapons? American arms sales to Taiwan? U.S.-China military cooperation? Afghanistan and Iraq pullbacks? Iran and Pakistan dilemmas? No previous Sino-American summit has confronted so many issues. This testifies to China's increasing prominence.

How much room will this week's agenda have for "human rights"? After diplomatic relations were normalized in 1979, and especially after the Tiananmen slaughter of June 4, 1989, human rights became an important issue in Sino-American summits. Yet, until this week's announcement of nine executions in the Xinjiang region, the Obama administration, contrary to the expectations raised by the president's election campaign rhetoric, demonstrated little interest in stimulating the People's Republic to abide by its international human rights commitments, such as the UN Convention Against Torture. Nor has it applied public pressure for China to take on new commitments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Beijing signed in 1998 but has not ratified.

To be sure, many agenda items involve human rights of one kind or another. The rights to a habitable environment, a decent job and protection against nuclear extermination are universal. The lives of tens of millions in the Near and Middle East can be affected by other decisions reached next week. And Taiwan's free society has a huge stake in any cross-strait military arrangements.

Yet none of those items addresses “human rights" in the sense of the political and civil rights of 1.3 billion Chinese. During the past three years, the Communist dictatorship on the Mainland has again tightened restrictions on its own citizens' most basic freedoms of expression-speech, publication, assembly, organization and religion. Those who challenge these restrictions have been arbitrarily and harshly punished through a comprehensive array of informal, administrative and criminal sanctions. The cruelty to which many courageous people have been subjected for attempting to experiment with democracy, implement a genuine rule of law or practice their religion is unworthy of a government that has made great social and economic progress in recent years.

Despite such progress, the regime is facing a rising tide of popular protests against a broad range of grievances in many areas, not only Tibet and Xinjiang. Instead of establishing democratic institutions to provide satisfactory outlets for processing these grievances, Beijing's response is unremitting repression. Rights defenders and lawyers who seek to utilize existing weak legal institutions are themselves often harassed, beaten, deprived of their livelihood, detained and prosecuted. Many of them who fall ill in prison are denied necessary medical care in an apparent effort to permanently incapacitate them and deter others. Probably millions of Chinese hope that Obama will condemn such abuses and press their leaders for reforms.

Obama's bargaining position is not very strong. Not only does he need Chinese cooperation on many problems, but he also represents a government that has itself been a deserving target for human rights criticisms. The invasion of Iraq and the disgraces at Guantanamo and Abu Graib symbolize America's most shameful international misconduct in decades. Moreover, Obama has been disappointingly slow in undoing some of his predecessor's worst civil liberties violations at home as well as abroad.

Will the able team recently assembled by Obama and Secretary of State Clinton persuade their Chinese counterparts to undertake systemic reform and cooperate in some substantial human rights initiatives? It won't be easy, even if Obama and Clinton decide to press harder than they have to date. Bland Washington statements and a private talk with China's President Hu Jintao are unlikely to bring transparency and fair trials to Chinese justice.

There is a conservative climate among Beijing's leaders, and, with the aid of Cuba, Sudan, Egypt and other massive human rights violators, their diplomats at the UN are now adept at fending off foreign censure and suggestions. Reflecting China's heightened influence, the country's new nationalism and America's own human rights vulnerability, the leadership has apparently decided to tough it out, while throwing the U.S. a face-saving bone or two.

Renewal of the largely ineffectual, on-again, off-again official bilateral “dialogues" that China uses to placate foreign democracies will not impress increasingly skeptical American human rights NGOs. Nor will a return to the regime's old trick of releasing a few high profile activists from confinement, while quietly locking up more. A stirring speech to the Chinese people and a serious meeting with dissidents would at least demonstrate Obama's sincerity, but are not scheduled. So will the young president return home with much to show human rights supporters?

Jerome A. Cohen is co-director of New York University's U.S.-Asia Law Institute and Senior Advisor of Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers

Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Calls for Investigation of Xu Zhiyong's Detention

Date: 2009-08-21

In a letter sent today, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers called on Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to investigate the detention of Mr. Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar and rights defender who was detained by police on July 29, 2009.

Mr. Xu is a lecturer at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and a former Visiting Scholar at the China Law Center at Yale Law School. He is serving his second four-year term as a deputy of the Haidian District People’s Congress in Beijing, and in 2003, he founded the Open Constitution Initiative, which later became Gongmeng, a legal aid center which had been working on citizens’ civil rights cases. Mr. Xu and his fellow lawyers provided legal assistance to the parents of children affected by melamine-contaminated milk and issued a report regarding the Chinese government’s handling of unrest across the Tibetan plateau.

On July 14, 2009, Gongmeng was notified by the Beijing Municipal Office of the State Administration of Taxation and the Beijing Local Taxation Bureau it was being fined 1.42 million RMB for tax evasion. Gongmeng Legal Research Center was shut down on July 17, and Mr. Xu was detained by police on July 29, on charges of tax evasion. Another Gongmeng staff member, Ms. Zhuang Lu (庄璐), was also detained. Mr. Xu was formally arrested on August 12, and he was informed on August 17 that Gongmeng Legal Research Center was shut for providing “false data” when it registered as a company. The Haidian Industry and Commerce Bureau claimed that the public interest activities of Gongmeng were inconsistent with its registration as a commercial enterprise. Prior to its closure, numerous unsuccessful attempts were made by Gongmeng lawyers to pay the fines for tax evasion.

In its letter, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers highlighted relevant international and domestic laws, and emphasized to Premier Wen its concern that Mr. Xu’s detention resulted from his professional commitment to providing legal assistance in politically sensitive cases, undermining the development of the rule of law in China.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. It is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers Highlights the Case of Liu Xiaobo

Date: 2009-07-02

In a letter sent to Premier Wen Jiabao today, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers urged the Chinese government to investigate interference in lawyer Mo Shaoping's practice of law. The Committee acted on reports that Mr. Mo's right to effectively represent his client, Dr. Liu Xiaobo, was being denied, Mr. Mo was told that he could not represent his client, who was arrested on “suspicion of incitement to subvert state power," because his name had been found in one of Dr. Liu’s files. Mr. Mo has said he will challenge the directive. The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers requested an immediate investigation and urged Premier Wen to ensure that Dr. Liu receive full and effective access to counsel, in compliance with China's obligations under both Chinese and international law. The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. It is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

A Missing Chinese Lawyer

Author: Martin Flaherty
Date: 2009-04-28
The New York Times

To the Editor: "After 10 Years and 2,000 Deaths, China Still Presses Its Crusade Against Falun Gong" (news article, April 28) notes that some persecuted Falun Gong practitioners in China have recently been represented by lawyers. But it should be noted that such lawyers themselves face severe repression for taking on these clients. Urgent in this regard is the case of Gao Zhisheng, a human rights lawyer who was "disappeared" by police in China on Feb. 4 and has not been heard from since. Mr. Gao had represented members of Falun Gong and had written a letter to President Hu Jintao calling for an end to their persecution. He was later detained for two months and left a detailed account of torture he suffered at the hands of his captors. Foreign governments and N.G.O.’s have called upon China to release Mr. Gao or at least to provide information about his health and whereabouts. The Chinese government has refused. Martin Flaherty New York, April 28, 2009 The writer, a professor of international human rights at Fordham Law School, is vice chairman of the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers.

New York Law Journal Spotlights the Committee to Support Lawyers Efforts on Behalf of Missing Chinese Attorney

Author: Jeff Storey
Date: 2009-04-21
New York Law Journal

A group of New York-based lawyers and legal scholars has joined other alarmed observers of China in attempting to intercede for Gao Zhisheng, a well-known Chinese human rights lawyer who disappeared after he reportedly was forcibly removed from his home by police on Feb. 4.

The Committee to Support Lawyers in China wrote to Minister of Justice Wu Aiying last month to "respectfully ask that you take all necessary steps to investigate Mr. Gao's disappearance and ensure his personal safety and other rights as a citizen of the People's Republic of China. As Mr. Gao appears to have been detained outside of formal legal proceedings and without legal cause, we also urge you to release him without delay." (See Letter.)

The expression of support by American lawyers for a beleaguered colleague overseas is reminiscent of the New York lawyers' protests on behalf of Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was removed from office and placed under house arrest by former President Pervez Musharraf (Read the article in NYLJ, July 2, 2008, subscription may be required).

The New York committee to support Chinese lawyers is a relatively new organization housed at Fordham University School of Law's Leitner Center for International Law and Justice. It is an offshoot of the center's Rules of Law in Asia Program.

Mr. Gao, 44, known for speaking out about official corruption and police abuse, raised the ire of Chinese authorities with his efforts to defend religious freedom and other causes. Once lauded by the justice ministry as one of the country's 10 best lawyers, his license to practice was taken away and his law firm closed down in 2005 because of his condemnation through letters, essays and interviews of police treatment of Falun Gong members, Christians and others.

In 2006, he was detained and received a three-year prison sentence, which was suspended for five years, for "inciting subversion." After a two-month detention in 2007, he described treatment amounting to torture. His family fled China in January due to what they said was constant police surveillance and harassment.

In light of Mr. Gao's assertions that he had been abused, the New York committee wrote the Chinese justice minister that "we fear for [Mr. Gao's] personal safety."

It argued that the detention and harassment of Mr. Gao were inconsistent with United Nations standards on the rule of lawyers, which obligate governments to ensure that lawyers are free to perform their professional functions without "intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference" and that lawyers should not be penalized "for any actions taken in accordance with recognized professional duties, standards and ethics."

Moreover, it suggested that Mr. Gao's predicament is contrary to the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which China is a party.

Although China has made "enormous strides" toward building a rule of law, its treatment of Mr. Gao is "by no means an isolated incident," Martin S. Flaherty, a Fordham professor who is a vice chair of the committee, said in an interview. The group estimates that more than 500 attorneys in China have been detained in recent years in connection with sensitive criminal, political, religious, property and environmental cases.

"What is surprising and troubling [about Mr. Gao's case] is that he has been held so long without information," said Mr. Flaherty.

In fact, Jerome A. Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that what has happened to Mr. Gao represents "a relatively new tack" - the use of "thugs" sanctioned by Chinese authorities but operating outside official channels to clamp down on dissidents.

According to the latest U.S. State Department report on human rights in China, released Feb. 25, the government's record "has remained poor and worsened in some areas."

"The government continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison journalists, writers, activists, and defense lawyers and their families, many of whom were seeking to exercised their rights under the law," the report says.

So far, China has not released any information about Mr. Gao in response to the New York committee's letter or any of the other expressions of concern from U.N. agencies, other governments and nongovernmental organizations.

Mr. Flaherty said that "one of the greatest challenges in human rights advocacy is dealing with China," which sometimes bridles at what it regards as interference in its sovereignty. "One has to be very careful."

Here, however, given the unusual nature of the case, the committee made the decision to publicize Mr. Gao's disappearance.

The letter "can't hurt," said Mr. Cohen, a senior adviser to the committee. "We are at rock bottom."

Mr. Cohen said it is unlikely the Chinese would pay any attention to a letter from U.S. lawyers. "But they might pay attention to [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton," he said.

The committee also wrote to Ms. Clinton (See Letter), requesting her "to ask the Chinese government to immediately verify Mr. Gao's whereabouts and personal safety and, hopefully, reassure those of us concerned about his well being that he is unharmed."

A spokesman for the State Department in an e-mail Friday said the United States is, indeed, "deeply concerned" about the well being of Mr. Gao.

He added that the United States has communicated those concerns "repeatedly, both in Washington and Beijing." In particular, he said that a "senior representative" at the U.S. Embassy raised Mr. Gao's case with "high-level counterparts" at China's Foreign Affairs Ministry on March 23.

He said the U.S. government has called on the Chinese "to ensure that Mr. Gao's treatment while in custody meets international standards."

Ms. Clinton was criticized by some human rights advocates when, after a recent trip to China, she told reporters that she had broached the general issue of human rights, but observed that those issues "cannot interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change conference, and the security crisis."

"There are a lot of other considerations going on here," Mr. Flaherty acknowledged.

Nevertheless, he said that U.S. lawyers have an obligation to speak out when lawyers in other countries "are persecuted for doing their job." And he said the Pakistani case shows that their efforts can be effective in publicizing actions against lawyers.

On a personal level, Mr. Cohen said he feels compelled to do whatever he can to help Mr. Gao, whom he has met and regards as a man of tremendous courage.

"I admire the guy," he said.

The Committee to Support Lawyers in China has a 10-member steering committee and is in the process of building a board of advisors. Its chairman is Robert Hornick, a professor at the University of Arizona Law School. The other vice chair is R. Scott Greathead, a litigation partner in the New York office of Wiggin and Dana.

Read the article at (NYLJ.com.) (subscription may be required).

Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers highlights case of Gao Zhisheng

Date: 2009-03-31

In a letter sent yesterday, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers called on the Chinese Ministry of Justice to investigate the disappearance of Chinese lawyer Gao Zhisheng.

The Committee acted on reports that Mr. Gao, who in 2001 was recognized by the Ministry of Justice as one of the country's ten best lawyers, was reportedly taken from his home on February 4, 2009, by a group of ten people including uniformed police. Mr. Gao has not been heard from since then and the Chinese government has not responded to repeated calls to confirm his safety.

Mr. Gao is one of China's most well-known lawyers. He began to take on pro bono work to defend the rights of the poor in the late 1990s, and between 2004 and 2006 also took on cases of Falun Gong practitioners, so-called "house" Christians (Chinese Christians unaffiliated with registered churches in China), and democracy activists. He defended them against persecution and sentencing without trial to labor camps, where they were physically and sexually abused. He also wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, calling for the end of persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

In 2006 he was detained and received a suspended 3-year prison sentence for inciting subversion.?Additionally, his law firm was shut down and his license to practice law was revoked.

In an account of a two-month detention in 2007 that was released this year, Mr. Gao details the torture he was subjected to, including beatings with electrified batons, burning his eyes with cigarettes, and other abuses amounting to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. He also states that he was threatened with punishment of death if he released the details of his mistreatment.

Prior to reports of his disappearance this year, Mr. Gao and his family lived under constant police surveillance. Mr. Gao�s family was forced to leave China in January due to the surveillance and repeated harassment by police.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers emphasized in their letter to the Ministry of Justice that the detention and harassment of Mr. Gao as a consequence of his professional decision to take on clients in politically sensitive cases undermines the development of a professional and independent bar and the rule of law in China.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. It is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

Beijing Must Reveal Fate of Human Rights Lawyer

Author: Jerome A. Cohen
Date: 2009-03-19
South China Morning Post

It is 43 days since the most recent "disappearance" of Gao Zhisheng, China's most famous human rights lawyer, who boldly sought to use the law to battle corruption, overturn illegal property seizures, expose police abuses and defend religious freedom.

His captors - apparently the notorious guo bao, the "national defence" unit of China's public security agency - had threatened to kill the 44-year-old Christian activist during previous detentions marked by obscene torture. Beijing's continuing refusal to comment on Gao's fate makes his case resemble those of the "disappeared" in Latin American dictatorships.

Last week, Gao's wife, two children and sister arrived in the US after being smuggled out of China. Until their arrival, international attention on Gao's own safety had to remain muted. Mainland persecution had forced some cruel choices upon the Gao family. After closing his law firm and taking away his lawyer's licence in 2005, the regime convicted him of "inciting subversion" in late 2006 because of his open letters, essays, interviews and hunger strike condemning police treatment of the Falun Gong, Christians and others.

It then released him on a five-year suspended sentence to home surveillance that proved harsher than prison, not only for Gao but also for his wife and daughter. By late 2008, repeated secret police harassment and brutality had made both mother and daughter, now 15, so suicidal that the family decided that their survival depended on escaping from China. On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry denied it had persecuted the family.

It would have been impossible for Gao to leave with them. He was too closely monitored, and on many occasions his tormentors had warned him that he would never be allowed to leave China alive.

Early on February 4, 31/2 weeks after his family's departure, more than 10 police and thugs spirited Gao out of bed, and he has not been seen since. Nor has the Chinese government offered the slightest word about him despite repeated inquiries from UN agencies and foreign governments, non-governmental organisations and the media. Just before the UN Human Rights Council's February 9 review of China's record, the Canadian government formally questioned Beijing about allegations that its agents had tortured Gao and other human rights activists and lawyers. The Chinese government did not respond, either during the public hearing or subsequently.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which has many times condemned China in other cases, is reportedly pursuing Gao's case. Human rights NGOs have also asked for assistance from the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, who interviewed Gao in late 2005 and who protested to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about police attempts to interfere with the interview.

Unfortunately, Gao's situation has become so grave that it should easily warrant an urgent appeal for the prevention of loss of life by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The release on February 8 of his previously unpublished account of the 13-day torture and subsequent further two-month detention to which he was subjected in 2007 only heightens concern for his life.

That account not only accused his captors of holding burning cigarettes to his eyes, beating and starving him, and applying electric shocks to his genitals, but it also revealed their warning that he would die if he told anyone about the ordeal.

Nothing similar to habeas corpus exists in mainland legislation or practice. But the UN Convention against torture, which Beijing ratified two decades ago, and its other international human rights commitments, obligate it to come clean about Gao. It is time for the court of world opinion to insist: "Show us the prisoner and justify his detention."

Jerome A. Cohen is co-director of New York University's U.S.-Asia Law Institute and Senior Advisor of Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers

Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers calls for investigation into harassment and intimidation of lawyers in China

Date: 2008-11-26

In a letter sent yesterday, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers called on the Beijing Lawyers Association to investigate reports of harassment of lawyers in China.

The Committee, which is housed at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School, is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

The Committee acted on reports that after publishing an appeal online on August 26, calling for direct election of the officials leading the Beijing Lawyers Association (equivalent to a bar association), a number of lawyers have been intimidated, harassed, and even fired from their firms. According to reports, Lawyers Cheng Hai and Li Subin, both signatories to the appeal, were asked to leave their positions at the Beijing Yitong Law Firm on October 30 following a visit to the firm by six or seven officials from the Haidian District Bureau of Justice. The firm's director is said to have felt pressured to dismiss the lawyers. Another signatory to the appeal, Tang Jitian, was asked to leave the Haodong firm in Beijing "for the sake of the future of the firm." Other signatories have reportedly been summoned by their district bureaus of justice, and firm heads were told that if lawyers in the firm who signed the appeal failed to withdraw their signatures, then their firms would face problems with their annual licensing inspection.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers emphasized in their letter to the Beijing Lawyers Association Director that penalizing lawyers for expressing their views on this issue is inconsistent with international principles and Chinese domestic law, and is contrary to the rule of law and the development of a vibrant, independent bar. The Committee called on the Director to investigate the reports, and if true, vigorously denounce the dismissals and do all within his power to help the lawyers to be reinstated with their firms.