By EDWARD WONG APRIL 8, 2015
BEIJING — Five women’s rights activists are being held illegally in Beijing because the police have failed to ask prosecutors to formally arrest them, the lawyers for three of them said on Wednesday.
According to Chinese law, the police are generally required to file a request for a formal arrest to prosecutors within 30 days of detaining someone if they want to continue the detention, the lawyers said. In the case of the five women, the deadline for that was Tuesday.
The lawyers checked with the prosecutor’s office in the Haidian district of Beijing, where the women are being held, and discovered no applications had been filed, they said.
“Now it has become overtime detention,” said Yan Xin, a lawyer for Li Tingting, one of the five women. “The police have violated the law.”
The lawyers had said earlier that the police were investigating the women on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge that can result in a multiyear prison sentence and that has been increasingly used by officials to silence dissenters.
Li Tingting, who works under the pseudonym Li Maizi, has been known in advocacy circles since 2012.
The five women were detained in a coordinated move by police officers in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou starting the evening of March 6. The women — Ms. Li, 25; Wu Rongrong, 30; Zheng Churan, 25; Wei Tingting, 26; and Wang Man, 33 — had been organizing peaceful nationwide protests that would have taken place around March 8, International Women’s Day, to denounce sexual harassment on public transportation. Those taking part in the campaign would have put stickers on subways and buses.
Mr. Yan said that he had met Ms. Li at the Haidian Detention Center on Tuesday, and that she had told him the police had informed her they had filed formal arrest applications. But there is no evidence that that has happened, Mr. Yan said. He said that Ms. Li seemed to be doing fine, and that she had told him she was prepared for any possible course of action.