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

Rule of Fear and Torture

China abandoning rule of law: Group of leading lawyers and judges expresses grave concern over the detention of legal professionals

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Top human rights lawyers say Xi Jinping’s China is moving farther and farther away from the rule of law amid new claims about torture of Chinese attorneys.
Writing in the Guardian on Tuesday, a group of leading lawyers and judges from the US, Europe and Australia expressed “grave concern” over the detention and treatment of legal professionals.

The authors – which include former French justice minister Robert Badinter as well as British human rights lawyers Michael Mansfield QC and Clive Stafford Smith -- called on China to release “the detained or arrested lawyers and others held with them”, describing their detention as “without legal basis”.
The letter – written to coincide with the Day of the Endangered Lawyer – comes after human rights lawyer Xie Yang detailed being tortured while in police custody. 

He was beaten, forced into stress positions, deprived food, drink and sleep, denied medical care and received death threats, with one inquisitor saying: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”.
Xie was one of nearly 250 lawyers, legal assistants and activists that were rounded up in a nationwide crackdown in July 2015. 

While most were released, about ten are still in custody or have been disappeared.
Two other lawyers targeted in that campaign, Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang, were tortured with electroshocks until they fainted, drawing particular concern from the authors of the letter.
The signatories also detailed instances of detainees fed unnecessary medicine, and highlighted one case where the repercussions of torture do not end once released. 

Li Chunfu, a lawyer and brother of Li Heping, was released earlier this month but displayed signs of severe mental illness, with some describing him as a “broken man”.
China has ratified the UN convention against torture, and the authors called on Xi to uphold international law if China truly wanted the responsibility of a global power.
“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,” the letter said.
“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.”
A similar group penned a letter a year ago calling for China to end its crackdown on lawyers and activists then in its early days, but there has been no signs of improvement, promoting the lawyers to “write again to express our continued grave concern over subsequent developments in China”.
The signatories also included David Collins, former president of the American Bar Association, Elizabeth Evatt, a leading Australian civil rights lawyer, and Manfred Nowak, the former UN rapporteur on torture.

“We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”

'Your only right is to obey': human rights attorney Xie Yang  describes torture in China's secret jails

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Lawyer Xie Yang before his detention by Chinese authorities. 

On day one of his detention Xie Yang was shackled to a metal chair and ordered to explain why he had joined an illegal anti-Communist party network.
On day two he was moved to a secret prison and informed: “Your only right is to obey.”
Finally, on day three, the violence began.
“We’ll torture you to death just like an ant,” one inquisitor warned the Chinese human rights lawyer during a punishing marathon of interrogation sessions and beatings designed make him confess to crimes he denies.
“I’m going to torment you until you go insane,” another captor bragged. “Don’t even imagine that you’ll be able to walk out of here and continue being a lawyer. You’re going to be a cripple.”

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The claims – which human rights activists say are consistent with previously documented forms of abuse in China – are contained in a transcript of lawyers’ interviews with one victim of the country’s ongoing crackdown on human rights attorneys.
Xie Yang, a 44-year-old lawyer, was detained in the central city of Hongjiang on 11 July 2015, on day three of what campaigners describe as an unprecedented Communist party assault on civil rights attorneys.
More than 18 months after that crackdown began, at least four of its key targets, including Xie, remain behind bars facing trial for crimes including subversion.
Xie’s legal team decided to release the explosive and highly detailed transcript of their conversations with him last week – in defiance of authorities – in protest at the refusal to set their client free.
His statement paints a devastating portrait of the tactics being used to wage China’s so-called “war on law”.
It comes after Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist who worked with several of the detained lawyers, gave the most detailed account yet of his 23-day imprisonment in an underground jail in Beijing.
Speaking to the Guardian at his new home in northern Thailand, Dahlin claimed that after being detained by state security agents in January 2016 he was deprived of sleep and forced to endure exhausting late-night interrogation sessions; denied the right to exercise, sunlight and access to his embassy; and questioned using lie-detection equipment with the Orwellian name of a “communication enhancement machine”.
“These facilities are built to break you,” Dahlin said of the covert centre where he was held under 24-hour guard in a padded cell.
In a series of interviews with his lawyers at the start of this year, Xie, whose Chinese nationality appears to have exposed him to far more brutal treatment than Dahlin, described a range of physical and mental abuse.
After being picked up by security agents on 11 July, he was taken to a police station, chained up and questioned about his involvement in an “anti-party and anti-socialist” group of lawyers.
The next day he was moved to a secret interrogation facility inside a guesthouse in the state capital, Changsha, where the torture began.
Xie was forced to sit in stress positions on a stack of plastic chairs in which it was impossible for his feet to touch the floor. 

“I had to sit there for more than 20 hours, both legs dangling in such pain until they began numb,” he recounted.
Traditional beatings were also doled out.
“They’d split up the work: one or two would grab my arms while someone used their fists to punch me in the stomach, kneed me in the stomach, or kicked me with their feet,” Xie claimed, according to a translation of his testimony published on China Change, a human rights website.
“This is a case of counterrevolution! Do you think the Communist party will let you go?” he quoted one of his captors as saying. 

“I could torture you to death and no one could help you.”
Xie, who remains in custody, claimed agents also issued thinly veiled threats against his family and friends.
“Your wife and children need to pay attention to traffic safety when they’re out in the car. There are a lot of traffic accidents these days,” one agent told him.

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Chinese authorities have not responded to Xie’s allegations and security officials rarely address such claims.
But in a recent editorial, Xinhua, Beijing’s official news agency, rejected criticism of China’s current human rights situation, which some observers describe as the worst since the days following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
“Certain western countries, while turning a blind eye to their own deep-rooted human rights issues, such as rampant gun crime, refugee crises and growing xenophobia, have a double standard on human rights, alongside a sense of superiority,” Xinhua said.
Terry Halliday, an American Bar Foundation scholar who recently published a book about China’s human rights lawyers, said the abuse described by Xie was now “par for the course” for those deemed enemies of the Chinese Communist party.
“It all rings true,” he said. 

“Nothing would surprise me about the degree to which the authorities will go in order to get the kind of response they want.
“It seems to me that part of the evil genius of the Chinese security apparatus has been that they have perfected forms of enormous pressure on individuals that are so powerful that they can compel almost any individual to comply, but yet they are not so manifest with broken bones, or the shedding of blood or external marks that can be used by the media or advocates around the world to criticise the government for inhumane treatment,” Halliday added.
“It’s torture behind a veil. We are left in the position of having to believe or not the person describing what happened to them, with very little evidence externally that allows us to validate that.”
Halliday said one case where there did appear to be clear and dramatic proof of abuse was that of Li Chunfu, another attorney who was seized during the crackdown and recently emerged from 500 days of secret detention.
Li, whose brother, Li Heping, was one of the operation’s best-known targets, was taken on 1 August 2015 during the initial wave of arrests of lawyers and activists. 

He returned home on 12 January after being granted bail.
But relatives claim nearly 17 months of severe abuse have transformed the 44-year-old lawyer into a shadow of his former self.
“His mind is shattered,” his wife, Bi Liping, is quoted as saying in one online account of the lawyer’s ordeal. 

A local hospital offered a preliminary diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Peter Dahlin and his Chinese torturers

Halliday said that in meetings Li Chunfu had always struck him as “a very poised, very articulate, sophisticated person”. 

In photographs taken following his release he was unrecognisable.
“He looked like a different man; someone a generation older. Five hundred days of total isolation. Who can withstand that?”
Xie Yang admitted that he, for one, had not been able to withstand it.
Speaking to his lawyers, he claimed he had suffered a “complete mental breakdown” and, facing a barrage of violence and threats, had caved in.
“I wanted to be done with he interrogations as quickly as possible … so whatever they wanted me to write, I wrote,” he said.
“I told them to type something up and I’d sign it, no matter what it said … I didn’t want to go on living.”

Rule by Fear and Torture

A tortured, broken lawyer and a hawkish judge cast deep pall over China’s legal system

By Simon Denyer

Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court, gives a report during the third plenary meeting of the National People's Congress, at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, March 13.

BEIJING — For 500 days, Li Chunfu, once a lively and tough human rights lawyer, was kept in secret detention by China’s Communist Party. 

When he was finally released last Thursday, his wife was so shocked she could hardly believe her eyes.
Instead of her 44-year-old husband, stood a thin, pale and sick man who looked as if he was in his 70s, Bi Liping said, a fearful and paranoid person who seemed to have been broken by the system.
A Beijing hospital soon gave him a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Li was one of 300 lawyers and advocates who were rounded up in a crackdown in July 2015: although most were soon released, two have been sentenced and four remain in detention.
In statements to the China Change website, relatives and fellow lawyers said Li had been severely tortured and drugged during detention.
But his story is not the only one to have cast a dark shadow over the rule of law in China this month.
In a remarkable speech on Saturday, the chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court told provincial judges to resist “erroneous” Western ideals of judicial independence, constitutional democracy and the separation of powers.
“One needs to have a clear-cut stand, and dare to show the sword against them, to struggle against any erroneous words and actions that deny the leadership of the Communist Party, or slander the rule of law and the judicial system of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Zhou Qiang said.
While the idea that the Communist Party is in firm control of the legal system is hardly new, to see the idea of judicial independence so explicitly condemned by the country’s topmost judge, a man once seen as a reformer keen on limiting officials’ power over local courts, came as a shock to many people.
Two open letters are circulating expressing outrage at Zhou’s remarks, one signed by 23 lawyers, and another signed by 155 leading liberal intellectuals.
“In the past few years, the legal community has been working hard toward establishing an independent judicial system,” said Lin Liguo, a former lawyer based in Shanghai, who wrote the lawyers’ letter and said Zhou’s remarks had burst reformers’ optimism.
“What Zhou said is basically that we don’t need judicial independence at all,” he said. 

“That’s why people are so upset.”
At a key meeting in October 2014, the party’s top leaders promised to give judges more independence from interference by local officials, while Xi Jinping has often pledged to strengthen the rule of law — while at the same time underlining that the Communist Party remains firmly in control and effectively above the law.
Yet such was the controversy stirred by Zhou’s remarks that the Supreme Court issued five separate social media posts on Sunday and Monday, each hundreds of words long, explaining and amplifying his remarks. 

At first, they attracted hundreds of comments from ordinary people, until censors shut down the comment function.
In a blog post, Jerome Cohen, an expert in Chinese law at New York University School of Law, called it “the most enormous ideological setback for decades of halting, uneven progress towards the creation of a professional, impartial judiciary.”
He said there was “enormous dissatisfaction among many judges at the restrictive, anti-Western legal values being imposed by Xi Jinping, with many younger officials leaving the courts and procuracy for work in law firms, business and teaching.”
Eva Pils, an expert in transnational law at King’s College, London said Zhou’s speech had come as a “real shock” to people in the legal system who had been educated to believe that China was striving for better rule of law, and who found it unacceptable that their country was “departing so completely and so rapidly from the reform path.”
It is, in other words, one more nail in the coffin of the idea that China’s legal and political system would ultimately move in a more liberal direction, experts said.
“I think that lots of people are still in denial about this departure from the reform path, and the turn to rule by fear, and that they are unwilling to consider the full implications of the new rhetoric,” Pils said.
Experts said Zhou may have come under pressure to publicly declare his loyalty to the party, especially as a team from the Communist Party’s anti-corruption arm had been reportedly carrying out an inspection of the Supreme Court since mid-November — or to have his appointment renewed at a major party congress in October.
But Zhou’s words still came across as particularly strident, as he insisted on the importance of “ideological work,” and recommended judges “severely strike” at people who use the Internet to endanger national security — code for undermining the Communist Party.
He also recommended judges protect the images of leaders, heroes and historical figures, “to resolutely safeguard the glorious history of the Party and the People’s Army.”
Zhou’s warning chimes with Xi’s campaign against “historical nihilism — questioning the Communist Party’s heroic account of its own history. 

In the past few weeks alone, a Chinese professor and a government official were both sacked, and a television producer was suspended, for criticizing Mao Zedong, who is officially revered as the founder of modern China even though he presided over the deaths of tens of millions of people in a famine during the Great Leap Forward and unimaginable cruelty during the Cultural Revolution.
The case of lawyer Li has underlined what happens to people who dare to challenge the party.
Li grew up poor in China’s central Henan province, dropping out of school at 14 to work in factories but then spending six grueling years studying in his spare time to follow in his brother’s footsteps to become a lawyer.
Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch said it was unclear what he was supposed to have done wrong — perhaps demonstrating outside a police bureau in Heilongjiang in 2014 to demand access to his client, perhaps being the brother of Li Heping, a well-known civil rights lawyer who was also detained in July 2015, or perhaps simply being tarred as an agent of a hostile foreign government.
But what broke him is no mystery, she said in a statement, citing how suspects are frequently beaten, hung by their wrists and deprived of sleep, as well as subject to indefinite isolation and threats to their families.
Lawyer Chen Jiangang said Li had lost around 30 lbs. in detention. 

He described his close friend’s mental health as worrying.
“He is constantly in doubt and fear after his release,” Chen said. 

“He is always fearful of police showing up to take him away. He is always fearful of leaving the house. Even when he is surrounded by family and friends, he still keeps asking ‘are they coming to get me?’”
Human Rights Watch’s Wang said China will have “zero credibility on rule of law” so long as individuals are tortured with impunity. 

“Li will likely never be the same after this horrific experience — and neither should Beijing,” she said.