CHINA ESQUIRE

The rule of law increasing through mass public participation? And not triggered by the party or a few activist lawyers? Sounds like a dream. But apparently, it’s happening. This is China recently ran a post about what happens in China when you can’t get your own lawyer to fight your cause: learn the law yourself… and win. I thought the free legal assistance ( legal aid in Xi’an) was a big deal. Well, this is too.

The article from Reuters ( h/t to Bill Dodson):

Qi Yunhui didn’t even graduate from middle school, but on a recent afternoon he addressed the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court with the confidence of a seasoned litigator.

When he came to Shenzhen in 2002, the fast talking native of China’s central province of Hubei worked in a leather shoe factory. Now, he is part of a new and growing breed of “citizens’ agents”, former workers offering cheap legal aid to fellow migrants involved in labor disputes.

In the past five years or so, these self-taught “barefoot” labor lawyers have proliferated, filling an important niche in a country where migrant workers are increasingly caught in a dilemma — they are encouraged by the leadership to know their rights, but lack effective, efficient channels to protect them.

“We want to encourage people to go to court,” Qi, 30, said over dinner with five toy factory workers he was representing in a case over unpaid overtime.

But change is slower to come at local levels, where officials are pre-occupied with finding — and keeping — investment.

“Local governments seek economic benefits alone. They think protecting the boss is protecting their rice bowl, but it’s the workers who pay the price of sacrificing their health and lives,” said Zhou Litai, a self-taught lawyer who went a step beyond “citizens’ agents” like Qi by taking the national exams to receive his lawyers’ license.

Qi says men have come to his office to threaten him and he’s received several menacing phone calls.

The factory-studded Pearl River Delta, an engine of economic growth, now has hundreds of “citizens’ agents”, Qi estimates, and nationwide there are several thousand. Most, like Qi, learned the law on their own through personal quests to get back pay.

The business model is simple. While most lawyers demand retainers and charge high fees, “citizens’ agents” work for a modest contingency, which means it costs little for workers to initiate proceedings.

Lawyer Zhou operates that way, too, taking a cut of the compensation awarded if he wins a case.

But all over the country, knowledge of rights — and a willingness to go to the courts to defend them — is on the rise.

Zhou, 51, who was born into a peasant family in Kaixian, now a rural part of western Chongqing, became interested in the law during his own stint as a migrant worker at a brick kiln, after the kiln’s manager failed to pay agreed wages.

In his more than 20 years as a lawyer, his offices have handled some 8,000 migrant worker cases, most of them over compensation claims for workplace injuries or unpaid wages.

To meet their needs, as the number of citizens’ agents rises, trained lawyers, too, are turning their attention toward the once neglected area of labor law.

The United Nations Development Programme, with funding from the Belgian government, started a pilot program last year with the All-China Lawyers’ Association to fund legal aid for migrant workers in 15 provinces.

The Beijing branch alone has handled some 4,000 cases in the past year and about 30,000 workers have contacted the clinic.

Despite the low pay-back for law firms handling these cases, those involved say it has been easy to attract lawyers.

“They see it as a way of engaging in social transformation,” said Alessandra Tisot, the UNDP’s Senior Deputy Resident Representative in Beijing.

This is both encouraging and yet has a dark side to it. Let me start with the encouraging: the rule of law is being grown through the raising of awareness, consciousness, and rights by these non-lawyer citizen’s agents. (Wow, that sounds almost communist…) But it is. The article mentioned the free legal aid for migrant workers, one of those bases being Xi’an and the subject of much attention in the blogosphere. But the idea that people are educating themselves in the law to the point where they can bring lawsuits for a tiny fee? It shows that people want to know the law. And once they know it, they are willing to exercise their rights under it.

The dark side? The idea of self taught “lawyers” running around and bringing cases for others isn’t the best of things in the long run. Frankly, a lot of Chinese lawyers (actual lawyers) aren’t the best of litigators already. (which is why a lot of large lawfirms are bringing in US and British litigators as foreign legal consultants in order to teach basic litigation and presentation skills) So if the self-taught “lawyers” are just as good, chances are that the quality is likely pretty low.

But I digress. Imagine that people can hire lawyers or this other tier of not-quite-lawyers to represent them. Is that a good thing in the long run? Probably not. In the short run, it is necessary. But in the long run, someone is going to have to clamp down on this practice of law by people who aren’t qualified to practice. Because having pseudo-lawyers running amok is not going to be good to establish a solid legal system that can command the respect of the international community.

The bright side is that societal transformation can happen through this. The silver lining: someone is going to have to regulate this industry once it happens. And there will be some unhappy non-lawyers out there once it happens.

Don’t get me wrong though–on the whole, I still see this as a very positive step. But since it seems everyone will look at this positively, someone has to be the voice of caution. Who else better than a lawyer?

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