China hands lengthy jail terms to two rights lawyers in crackdown By Reuters

Written by Lori Chen

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese court on Monday sentenced two prominent human rights lawyers to more than a decade in prison each, a relative and rights groups told Reuters, the latest move in a years-long crackdown on civil society by President Xi Jinping. . .

Relatives told Reuters at the time that Xu Qiong, 50, and Ding Jiashi, 55, were put on trial behind closed doors in June last year on charges of government subversion at a court in Linshu County, northeastern Shandong Province.

Xu and Ding are leading figures in the New Citizens Movement, which sought greater transparency in the wealth of Chinese officials and citizens to be able to exercise their civil rights as written in the constitution.

Ding’s wife Luo Shengchun, who lives in the United States and has followed his case with US State Department officials, told Reuters about the verdict but said she had no further details.

And she said in a phone call: “Their lawyers are prevented from publishing the documents of the court’s rulings, and they do not dare to reveal the location of the ruling against them and the charges against them.”

She added that she would continue to press for information.

I won’t let them put Ding Jiashi and Xu Zhiyong in jail so easily. “

It added that Xu received a 14-year prison sentence and Deng was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The court and China’s Ministry of Justice did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The two had been held for more than three years, with Ding arrested by police in December 2019 shortly after he attended a rally in southern China with about 20 lawyers and other activists.

He was then held incommunicado for about six months while being routinely tortured to extract a confession, his lawyer, Peng Jian, told the court.

Xu, a close friend of Deng who once wrote an agonizing open letter calling for Xi to step down, was arrested in February 2020 after going into hiding.

Law added that the authorities prevented their lawyers from contacting foreign media, in a practice that has become increasingly common in recent years in order to stifle publicity around rights-related cases.

Both have previously been imprisoned for their activism.

“The farcical and farcical convictions and sentences of Xu Qiong and Ding Jiashi show President Xi’s unbounded hostility toward peaceful activism,” said Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The rights group added that the secret hearings they held were “riddled with procedural problems and allegations of ill-treatment”.

China has massively cracked down on dissent since Xi came to power in 2012. Hundreds of rights lawyers have been arrested and dozens jailed in a series of arrests known as the “709” cases, referring to a crackdown on July 9, 2015.

China rejects criticism of its human rights record, saying it is a country with the rule of law and imprisoned lawyers and rights activists are criminals who have broken the law.