Aug 10 2009
human rights attorneys in china compilation
I was speaking to a friend a few months back, and he wants to shift into human rights law in China. I looked at him with a certain tinge of sadness in my eyes, and could only ask him one question, “You do know what you’re getting into right? It’s a hard life. It’s hard… and you may be asking for persecution, trouble, and a lot of pain and suffering from your own government.” There was nothing else I could say. And when he responded in the affirmative resolutely, I could only stare a little and say, “Okay.” And it’s ironic that since then, I feel like I’ve only seen a slew of articles talking about the troubles of human rights attorneys.
I wish my friend the best in his new endeavor. It’s hard to be fully supportive when you know that this is the pathway of suffering, but at the same time, it is encouraging to know that there are still people out there who don’t want to be uber-corporate lawyers at King & Wood or some other major Chinese law firm and make a boatload of money. But as I mentioned, I keep seeing articles about the suffering of human rights attorneys. Here are some.
From the AFP back in June ( h/t CDT):
A human rights group has condemned Chinese police for allegedly stripping and beating a prominent Shanghai lawyer during a nine-hour detention last week.
Police summoned Zheng Enchong, who has advised residents claiming to have been forcibly evicted, on Wednesday as part of an “economic investigation”, the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said.
Calls to the Shanghai police went unanswered and Zheng was not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.
The Washington Post got into the act ( h/t CDT):
Since the beginning of 2009 — a sensitive year filled with anniversaries of uprisings — the Chinese government has been forcing human rights law firms such as Yitong to shut down.
Formally, there is no crackdown; no police are swooping in to seize files or send attorneys en masse to labor camps. Instead, Beijing is simply using its administrative procedures for licensing lawyers and law firms, declining to renew the annual registrations, which expired May 31, of those it deems troublemakers. Human rights groups say dozens of China’s best defense attorneys have effectively been disbarred.
“It’s a collective strike,” said Cheung Yiuleung, a leader of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, an advocacy organization based in Hong Kong. “Compared with individual warnings, the annual check of licenses is more effective. . . . It has had a frightening effect on all lawyers on the mainland.”
A few weeks ago, a Beijing legal services service was shuttered according to the China Daily. ( h/t CDT) There’s even video interviews about the opposition. FYI, Gongmeng is one of the few groups that dared to represent the parents of the nearly 300,000 children sickened and the six who died last year as a result of dangerous milk additives.
More than a dozen officials of Beijing’s civil affairs bureau, which oversees civil groups in the capital, visited the center’s office in west Beijing on Friday morning and ordered it to shut down. The officials, carrying a legal closure notice, seized some files and computers, too, the center said.
The move comes two days after the Beijing tax authorities sent a formal notice to the center, imposing a hefty fine of 1.42 million yuan ($207,847) for having evaded taxes on funds received from overseas.
Xu Zhiyong, the center’s legal representative and an outspoken lawyer, said: “The bureau has no legal right to order a closure The research center has always been a division of the company that is registered with the authorities. There is no legal proof to show our group has not been registered properly.”
Beijing’s civil affairs and taxation bureaus, and the municipal office of the State taxation administration refused to provide information on the center on Friday.
Too many newspaper outlets are jumping on this story, including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I really don’t have much to add other than to say, it seems in China that you don’t do well by doing good. And that’s a sad thing in my eyes.
[...] Zhiyong’s detention was also covered at length by China Geeks, AP, China Esquire blog, TIME’s China Blog, CDT, Asia Sentinel, The Peking Duck, and Evan [...]