![\"TengBiao_SouthChinaMorningPost_jpg_600x676_q85\"](\"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/files\/2014\/10\/TengBiao_SouthChinaMorningPost_jpg_600x676_q85.jpg\")
<\/a>May Tse\/South China Morning Post\nHuman Rights lawyer Teng Biao<\/p>\n
Teng Biao is one of China\u2019s best-known civil-rights lawyers, and a prominent member of the weiquan, or \u201crights defenders,\u201d movement, a loosely knit coalition of Chinese lawyers and activists who tackle cases related to the environment, religious freedom, and freedom of speech and the press. He came to national attention in 2003 when he and two other young Peking University law students successfully petitioned parliament to end the \u201ccustody and repatriation\u201d law that gave police sweeping power to detain people for failing to have a residence permit or valid ID. The issue had come to national attention after a twenty-seven-year-old university graduate was beaten for failing to have proper identity papers.<\/p>\n
Teng, who is 41, is also a founder of gongmeng, the Open Constitution Initiative, a group of lawyers and academics who argue for greater rule of law and constitutional protections, and the New Citizens Movement, a broader group of civil rights activists. He is a lecturer at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing but has been banned from teaching since 2009 because of his political activities He is currently a fellow at Harvard Law School. I met him in Berlin in late August, a few days before he left for the United States.<\/p>\n
Ian Johnson: This week, the Chinese Communist Party is staging its annual plenum\u2014that much-watched event in which hundreds of members of the party\u2019s central committee gather to discuss policy. This year\u2019s theme is supposed to be \u201cgoverning the country according to law.\u201d Do you expect any significant changes to come of it?<\/p>\n
Teng Biao: I don\u2019t care what they talk about; I don\u2019t expect anything. For the past two years they\u2019ve arrested more than three-hundred human rights defenders and intellectuals, such as Pu Zhiqiang, Tang Jingling, and Ilham Tohti. And they have destroyed many Christian churches, they cracked down on the Internet, and they published a series of articles against universal values [an expression for human rights, civil liberties and other values that are enshrined in international law but often criticized in China as Western], constitutionalism, and judicial independence. With such actions, they can\u2019t have meaningful reform of the legal system.<\/p>\n
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