Rogue Nation

China’s massive attack on human rights and the rule of law continues
The Washington Post

Li Wenzu, the wife of imprisoned lawyer Wang Quanzhang, reacts before an interview at her home in Beijing on Monday. 

ON JULY 9, 2015, China launched its war on lawyers. 

Over the course of a few weeks, some 300 lawyers, legal assistants and other advocates for the rule of law were rounded up. 

One of the most prominent, Wang Quanzhang, disappeared into secret detention on Aug. 3, 2015; after being held incommunicado for nearly 3½ years, he was the last to go on trial. 

On Monday, he was sentenced to 4½ years in prison on charges of subversion, putting a punctuation mark on one of the principal means of repression used by Xi Jinping to consolidate power.
Since taking office six years ago, Xi has employed corruption investigations to purge rivals in the Communist Party; stepped up censorship of social media; and conducted a massive campaign against Muslims in the East Turkestan colony, hundreds of thousands of whom have been confined to concentration camps and forced to undergo “reeducation.” 

Meanwhile, he has sought to stifle dissent by targeting the lawyers who defend human rights activists and religious believers or bring cases against local authorities for corruption.
Most of the lawyers and activists detained in what became known (for its July 9 date) as the 709 campaign were held for a few weeks; a number were later stripped of their licenses or driven out of business. 

But at least four besides Mr. Wang have been sentenced to prison. 

In August 2016, lawyer Zhou Shifeng and activist Hu Shigen were given terms of seven and 7½ years, respectively; in November 2017, lawyer Jiang Tianyong was sentenced to two years. 

The next month, human rights activist Wu Gan was handed an eight-year term.
Mr. Wang’s trial may have come last because of his refusal to buckle under pressure — including physical torture. 

While some lawyers signed confessions or publicly confessed to plotting against the government, Mr. Wang resisted to the end. 

When his closed trial was held on Dec. 26, he threw a wrench into the proceedings by firing his government-appointed lawyer.
His wife, Li Wenzu, bravely advocated on his behalf, speaking out about his treatment and shaving her head in protest of judges’ refusal to uphold Mr. Wang’s rights under Chinese law. 

She was prevented from attending his trial and denied visitation rights, along with seven lawyers appointed by the family. 

One of those lawyers, Yu Wensheng, has himself been detained incommunicado for more than a year, according to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
The crackdown on lawyers has attracted some international attention and protests; the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Mr. Wang was being held arbitrarily and called for his release. 

For the most part, the Trump administration has been silent, as it is on most human rights issues involving China.

But the State Department issued a statement Tuesday calling for Mr. Wang’s release and expressing concern about “the deteriorating situation for the rule of law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms in China.” 

While that’s not likely to influence Xi, the United States should be heard on cases such as this. 

The courageous Chinese lawyers still attempting to enforce the rule of law deserve the support of the democratic world.

Rogue nation: UN tells China to release human rights activists and pay them compensation

Document rejects Chinese government claims that activists voluntarily confessed to their crimes at trials.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Lawyer Xie Yang who has been detained by Chinese authorities as part of a crack down on human rights. 

The United Nations has demanded that China should immediately release prominent human rights activists from detention and pay them compensation, according to an unreleased document obtained by the Guardian.
The report, which has not been made public, from the UN’s human rights council says the trio had their rights violated and calls China’s laws incompatible with international norms.

Christian church leader Hu Shigen and lawyers Zhou Shifeng and Xie Yang were detained and tried as part of an unprecedented nationwide crackdown on human rights attorneys and activists that began in July 2015.
The operation saw nearly 250 people detained and questioned by police.
Hu was jailed for seven and a half years and Zhou was sentenced to seven years on subversion charges, while Xie is awaiting a verdict.
“The appropriate remedy would be to release Hu Shigen, Zhou Shifeng and Xie Yang immediately, and accord them an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations,” said the UN report seen by the Guardian, adding that Chinashould take action within six months.
The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, which reviewed the case, rejected Chinese government claims the three men voluntarily confessed to their crimes at their trials and said their detentions were “made in total non-observance of the international norms relating to the right to a fair trial”.
The group is a panel of five experts that falls under the UN’s human rights council, of which China is a member.
While its judgements are not legally binding, it investigates claims of rights violations and suggests remedies.
China promised to cooperate with the group when it ran for a seat on the human rights council in August 2016, when it also pledged to make “unremitting efforts” to promote human rights.
The group’s report on the Chinese activists said the trio were subjected to a host of rights violations, including being denied access to legal counsel, being held in “incommunicado detention” and their families “were not informed of their whereabouts for several months”.
Their detentions were due to “their activities to promote and protect human rights“, the UN found, while the opinion also encouraged China to amend its laws to conform with international standards protecting human rights.
Although Xie was released on bail after a trial in May, his wife, Chen Guiqiu said her husband was far from a free man.
State security agents rented a flat across the hall from his and Xie has 12 guards stationed 24-hours a day outside his building.
Police follow him whenever he goes out and despite the constant surveillance, he has to prepare reports for state security agents every four hours on what he has done and who he has spoken to.
But Chen welcomed the UN’s report and said she felt vindicated.
“Of course, he didn’t commit any crime, his arrest was completely illegal and I’m glad the UN, a very objective party that represents the international community, can see that,” said Chen, who fled to the US earlier this year.
“I hope this will put pressure on China and make them think twice the next time they consider arresting people on political charges.”
“Paying compensation would show the government admits they harmed our family, that they were wrong to subject us to more than two years of continuous harm,” she added.

During his detention, Xie was beaten and forced into stress positions, with one interrogator telling him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant.”
Ambassadors from countries including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, wrote to China’s minister of public security in February, voicing concerns over the torture and calling for an independent investigation.
“The working group’s opinion cuts straight through the government’s lies and shows that the arrests were always about retaliation against lawyers for protecting human rights,” said Frances Eve, a researcher at the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
“The government put enormous resources into their propaganda campaign to smear human rights lawyers as ‘criminals’, deploying state media, police, prosecutors and the courts.”
During the course of the panel’s investigation, the Chinese government said the men were jailed not because “they defend the legitimate rights of others” but rather they have “long been engaged in criminal activities, aimed at subverting the basic national system established under the China’s [sic] constitution”.
The UN rejected this claim.
Hu was arrested for leading an underground church, which works outside the government-sanctioned system.
He previously spent 16 years in prison for distributing leaflets on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent bloody crackdown.
Zhou is a prominent human rights attorney who founded the Fengrui law firm that was at the centre of the 2015 government “war on law”.
His firm represented dissident artist Ai Weiwei, members of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong and a journalist arrested for supported protests in Hong Kong.
The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention previously told China to release Liu Xia, the wife of the Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died in detention in July.
Liu Xia has been under house arrest since 2010, when her husband won the prize, despite never being charged with a crime.

China must respect lawyers’ human rights

"By detaining and disappearing these lawyers and law firm staff, China is in breach of its international obligations as well as Chinese domestic criminal law and constitutional principles. 

"It is also violating the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, the UN declaration on human rights defenders and the UN body of principles for the protection of all persons under any form of detention or imprisonment."

Wang Yu, a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer, pictured in April 2015. She and her husband Bao Longjun were arrested on subversion charges. Her son Bao Zhuoxuan has also disappeared. 
On 18 January 2016, senior lawyers, judges and jurists from many countries and international organisations wrote a letter to the Guardian to express our deep concern about the unprecedented crackdown on criminal defence and human rights lawyers that began on the night of 9 July 2015 with the enforced disappearance of lawyers Wang Yu and Bao Longjun, and their 16-year-old son, and has most recently included the emergence of lawyer Li Chunfu from over 500 days of incommunicado detention with signs of serious mental illness, as well as physical suffering.
From 9 July 2015 to the present, hundreds of lawyers, law firm staff, and family members have been subject to intimidation, interrogation, detention as criminal suspects, wrongful criminal convictions and forced disappearance.

We, the undersigned lawyers, judges and jurists, now write again to express our continued grave concern over subsequent developments in China, in particular the treatment of the lawyers and legal assistants named in our 18 January 2016 letter, as well as some of their close colleagues, supporters and family members.
We observe the following developments with concern:
• The authorities have continued to deny several of the detainees, who have been held incommunicado and are facing trial, access to their appointed lawyers (in cases including those of, Li Heping, Wang Quanzhang, and until recently Xie Yang and Li Chunfu.
• Detainees are reported to have suffered physical violence at the hands of prison guards: lawyer Xie Yang in January 2017 testified to torture methods including beatings; stress positions; several guards simultaneously blowing cigarette smoke in his face; food, drink and sleep deprivation; denial of medical care; denial of basic personal hygiene; death threats; and excessive questioning at the hands of the authorities. On 23 January 2017, lawyers Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang were reported to have been tortured with electric shocks that made them faint.
• Detainees are feared to have been inappropriately medicated (documented in the case of Li Chunfu, who was given pills for “high blood pressure” even though his blood pressure according to independent diagnosis is normal).
• The authorities have claimed that lawyers chosen by the detainees or their family members have been “dismissed” and replaced by lawyers chosen by the authorities (for example, in the case of Li Heping).
• Some detainees have suffered judicial persecution through implausible criminal charges and convictions including “subversion of state power”, “inciting subversion of state power” and other crimes against national security and public order (for example, in August 2016, Zhou Shifeng was sentenced to seven years in prison).
• Some detainees, including Wang Yu and her husband Bao Longjun and legal assistant Zhao Wei, are claimed to have been “released” from detention centres into private homes, and yet they are closely monitored and wholly isolated from friends and colleagues.
• Written, oral and video statements of self-incrimination and self-renunciation by the detainees, apparently induced by the authorities, have been released through official media channels (for example, lawyer Zhang Kai was induced to make such a statement, which he later retracted).
• The authorities have put pressure on detainees’ spouses, siblings, children and parents to persuade the detainees to confess and admit guilt (for example, video-recorded statements by the parents of lawyers Li Chunfu and Li Heping were obtained by means of false representations).
• Detainees’ families have suffered further persecution: for example, the wives of Li Heping, Wang Quanzhang, Xie Yang and Xie Yanyi have been subjected to police monitoring and harassment; the children of Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang have been denied enrolment at state schools due to police pressure; and the authorities have put pressure on the landlords of Wang Quanzhang’s and Xie Yanyi’s families to evict them from their homes.
• Detainees have been defamed through media reports, officially released video-clips and similar materials similar materials portraying them as criminals and enemies of their country.
Further, human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong is being held on charges of inciting subversion of state power, after having been disappeared on 21 November 2016. 

A colleague and friend of several of the original detainees, lawyer Jiang Tianyong has been forcibly disappeared and on at least two occasions tortured in the past; and his health remains frail, partly as a result of previous torture. 

There is grave concern that his rights to personal liberty, the right not to be tortured, and right to a fair trial have been violated yet again.
We continue to be particularly concerned about people who have been detained and/or disappeared and tortured on past occasions of forced disappearance or criminal detention. 

These include Li Heping, his brother Li Chunfu, Wang Quanzhang and Jiang Tianyong, as well as Zhang Kai, who retracted his self-renunciation statement in late August 2016.
Xi Jinping has repeatedly stated that “China is a country ruled by law” and that “every individual [Communist] party organisation and party member must abide by the country’s constitution and laws and must not take the party’s leadership as a privilege to violate them”. 

Yet the events just described appear to move farther and farther away from those commitments.
China has signed and ratified the UN convention against torture and signed the international covenant on civil and political rights. 

By detaining and disappearing these lawyers and law firm staff, China is in breach of its international obligations as well as Chinese domestic criminal law and constitutional principles. 

It is also violating the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, the UN declaration on human rights defenders and the UN body of principles for the protection of all persons under any form of detention or imprisonment.
In order to vindicate its claim to be a responsible stakeholder in the international community and to be a respected global superpower, it is imperative that China honour its international commitments to international conventions and human rights. 

Therefore, we respectfully urge China to:
• Ensure the release of the detained or arrested lawyers and others held with them without legal basis.
• Ensure access to counsel for all those detained, arrested or otherwise held as a criminal suspect.
• Confirm the whereabouts of those forcibly disappeared.
• Ensure that the rights of those detained, including their right to adequate medical treatment, are safeguarded.
• Ensure that those detained and their colleagues will be protected from any future control measures such as: tracking and following, violent attacks, soft detention, being “travelled”, being asked to have “chats”, criminal, administrative, judicial detention, forced disappearance, torture and psychiatric incarceration.
We will continue to monitor the fate of the lawyers and staff concerned closely.

Dominique Attias Vice-president of the Paris bar, general secretary of the International Observatory of Lawyers in Danger, France
Robert Badinter Former French minister of justice and former president of the French Constitutional Council, France
Gill H Boehringer Coordinator of the International Association of People’s Lawyers, former dean of the Macquarie University Law School, Australia
Laurence Bory President of the International Association of Lawyers (IAL)
Edgar Boydens Dormer president of the Dutch Brussels Ba, president of Lawyers with Borders (Belgium)
Kirsty Brimelow QC Chair of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC), UK
Jean-Pierre Buyle President of the French and German speaking bar of Belgium
Reed Brody Counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, United States
David Collins President, American Bar Foundation (2014-2016), United States
Alexandre Couyoumdjian and Virginie Dusen Co-chair, Association of Armenian Lawyers and Jurists, France
Elizabeth Evatt Companion of the Order of Australia; former president, Australian Law Reform Commission, and member of the UN Human Rights Committee; currently, commissioner, International Commission of Jurists, Australia
Pascal Eydoux President of the French National Bar Council; president of the International Observatory for Lawyers in Danger, France
Carlos Fuentenebro President of the Bizkaia Bar Association, Spain
Ruthven Gemmell President of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe
Sonia Gumpert President of the Madrid Bar Association, Spain
Patrick Henry President of the Human Rights Committee of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) and vice-president of Lawyers without Borders, Belgium
Asma Jahangir Jurist, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan, founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
Grégoire Mangeat President of the Geneva Bar Association, Switzerland
Michael Mansfield QC Barrister and professor at law, City University, London, UK
Andrea Mascherin President of the Italian National Bar Council, Italy
Juan E Mendez Professor of human rights law, former UN special rapporteur on torture, 2010-2016, Argentina
Marcus Mollnau President of the Berlin bar (Rechtsanwaltskammer Berlin), Germany
Manfred Nowak Professor of international law and human rights at Vienna University, Austria
Victoria Ortega Benito President of the Spanish National Bar Council, Spain
Christophe Pettiti General secretary of the Paris Bar Human Rights Institute, France
Stuart Russell Former administrative judge, Australia
Clive Adrian Stafford Smith Human rights lawyer, UK
David J Scheffer Former US ambassador at large for war crimes issues; Mayer Brown/Robert B Helman professor of law and director, Center for International Human Rights, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, USA

Rechtsanwalt und Notar Ulrich Schellenberg President of the German Bar Association (Deutscher Anwaltverein), Germany