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China Bars Two Rights Advocates From Travel

Date: 2010-11-08

by Andrew Jacobs, 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.



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.

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