August 19, 2006
Chinese Crackdown on Rights Lawyers Signals Effort to Deter Increasing Legal Challenges
By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING, Aug. 18 — Chinese officials are stepping up a crackdown on defense lawyers in the latest sign that Communist Party leaders are determined to stamp out legal challenges to their authority.
The Beijing police have detained Gao Zhisheng, one of the country’s most outspoken lawyers and dissidents, on suspicion of criminal activity, state media said Friday.
Separately on Friday, court officials in Shandong Province held a closed criminal trial of Chen Guangcheng, a legal expert and advocate of peasants’ rights, which Mr. Chen’s defense lawyers condemned as heavy-handed political persecution.
While the Chinese leadership is eager to create the impression that it is building an impartial legal system, the latest actions suggest that at least some powerful officials want to curtail the growing use of lawsuits to contest abuses of power, human rights violations, land seizures and official corruption.
The ruling party has encouraged the idea that people have legal rights as a way of checking petty corruption, improving efficiency and channeling social grievances into the party-controlled judicial system.
But a surge in social unrest in recent years, including protests by people frustrated that they are unable to exercise their constitutional rights, has alarmed local and national leaders.
Defense lawyers and legal scholars have also cooperated with one another and formed a nascent legal opposition. Mr. Gao and Mr. Chen are among an informal group of legal experts who consider themselves rights defenders. The moves to punish them may signal a broader effort to rein in legal protests.
Mr. Gao was detained by the Beijing Public Security Bureau “for questioning related to his suspected involvement in criminal activities,” the official New China News Agency said in a two-line dispatch on its English-language news wire on Friday.
The detention was not reported in Chinese by the agency or other state-run media. A spokesman for the Beijing police said he had no information about Mr. Gao’s case.
Mr. Gao, 42, is a prominent defense lawyer and human rights crusader who was stripped of his license to practice law late last year. He has been under constant police surveillance and harassment since then.
Until Tuesday, when he was detained while visiting relatives in Shandong Province, Mr. Gao remained openly combative. He issued sharply worded letters and statements denouncing official corruption and abuse of power and led a hunger strike to denounce persecutions of journalists and political opposition figures earlier this year.
He rallied members of underground Christian churches and adherents of Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual group, to assert themselves and press for greater freedoms.
Mr. Gao has offended some other critics of one-party rule, who argued that his flagrant attacks on party leaders were self-aggrandizing and threatened to set back gradual progress toward legal and religious tolerance.
But he has also been widely viewed as an international symbol of legal openness. Some opposition figures said the fact that he had been allowed to remain free despite his provocations indicated that officials under President Hu Jintao were reluctant to risk international opprobrium by arresting him.
“This is a warning to rights activists all around the country that no one is too big to be punished,” Hu Jia, an opposition figure who is close to Mr. Gao and was himself put under house arrest last month, said in a telephone interview. “They are attacking the leading symbol of the movement to scare everyone else.”
In a separate action, Shandong authorities held a two-hour criminal trial in Yinan County on Friday afternoon of Mr. Chen, 34, who taught himself the law despite being blind. The trial was marred by the detention of three of Mr. Chen’s legal advisers on Thursday.
One of them, Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing legal scholar, was held in a local police station until Mr. Chen’s hearing concluded, members of Mr. Chen’s defense team said. None of Mr. Chen’s Beijing-based lawyers were permitted to attend the trial, defense lawyers said. The court permitted two local lawyers to defend him.
Mr. Chen attracted international attention after he tried to organize a class-action suit last year on behalf of residents of the city of Linyi who had been forced to undergo abortions or sterilization in a campaign to meet population control quotas.
Local Communist Party officials retaliated, putting Mr. Chen under house arrest and later charging him with destroying property and blocking traffic. His supporters say the charges are concoctions and that Mr. Chen was under police guard at the time the crimes were said to have occurred.
There was no immediate verdict. The trial was postponed in July after Mr. Chen’s supporters had protested at the courthouse.
Chen Guangfu, Mr. Chen’s elder brother, who attended the hearing, said Mr. Chen’s lawyers had argued that the prosecution relied mainly on secondhand accounts from local officials. The defense, he said, was not permitted to call witnesses.
“It is difficult to accept that this was a fair trial if the defense cannot call witnesses to support its case,” Mr. Chen said.