2015-07-14
China intensified its sweeping crackdown on human rights lawyers and legal activists on Tuesday, as the country’s state media shrugged off growing international condemnation and lawyers under threat warned that the country’s already fragile rule of law would be further weakened.
The mass arrest drive that opened with a raid on the high-profile public interest law firm Fengrui last week deepened as rights lawyers across the country – including some who had advised the earlier batches of detainees — were summoned, detained or questioned.
The China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group (CHRLCG), a Hong Kong-based non-profit organization, said that as of Tuesday evening, 169 lawyers, legal staff or activists had been detained, arrested, subject to forced disappearance, held incommunicado or questioned and released. In some cases the lawyers’ drivers and even children were caught in the police net.
Guangdong rights lawyer Wang Quanping, who recently set up the July 10 Justice for Defense Lawyers group, said in an online statement that the ongoing detention of attorneys is “the worst thing to happen to the rule of law in China, in the past or in the future.”
“It’s like a modern version of book-burning,” Wang wrote. “This retrograde step by the government will condemn them to notoriety for the next 10 millennia.”
Lawyers across China braced for a late night knock on the door, but some remained defiant.
“I was surrounded [by police] who handed me two sheets of paper. I guess that was the summons, requiring me to go to the local police station,” Suzhou-based rights lawyer Ben Bo told RFA.
“I refused to cooperate. Over my dead body. I don’t cooperate with those people. My friends and family are all here [at my place] now to keep watch,” he said.
Ben said the standoff had continued into the evening Tuesday.
“I don’t rule out the possibility that they will come in the middle of the night and take me away, but I’m not going with them voluntarily,” he said.
Beijing lawyer Su Chifeng said she is making mental preparation for a visit from state security police.
“For now, they have just been in touch to warn me; it hasn’t got as bad yet as it has for other people. But I am making preparations [to be summoned or detained] at any time. I don’t think any of us feels safe right now,” she told RFA.
Beijing-based rights lawyer Cheng Hai said China’s legal community needed to stand together and use their legal skills to defend themselves against state lawlessness.
“Lawyers need to mobilize in every possible way, to sue the state and some police officers for illegal actions,” he told RFA on Tuesday.
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