Lawyer Held Amid Rights Talks

By Radio Free Asia
June 17, 2011

As EU and Chinese officials met in Beijing for a dialogue on human rights, authorities in Guangxi detained rights lawyer Yang Zaixin, while further details emerged about the plight of blind Shandong activist Chen Guangcheng.

EU officials pressed China Thursday on the disappearance of monks from a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, as well as on the rights of Uyghurs, Mongols and other minorities.

'The EU side expressed its concerns about the use of forced disappearances and extra-legal detentions,' an EU statement said, amid criticism from human rights groups that the dialogues were a means for Beijing to limit any real debate.

As the diplomats sat down, Yang, a public interest lawyer who has fallen foul of the authorities in the past for defending practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, was being taken away by police, his wife said.

"I asked [the police] the reason for his detention," said Yang's wife Huang Zhongyan, who came home on Tuesday to find the house empty and much of the couple's belongings confiscated.

"I asked him why we haven't had an official notice [of arrest] yet, and he got angry with me, and said, 'Are you mad? It doesn't happen so quickly.'"

"Then he hung up the phone," Huang said.

However, Huang found out that Yang was detained on suspicion of "tampering with witnesses," and is being held at the Beihai No. 1 Detention Center.

Yang, who works at Guangxi's Baijuming Law Firm, began rights defense work in 2003, after he was framed for prostitution and was taken into custody for "education."

Over the years, he has taken many sensitive cases, including those involving Falun Gong practitioners, land requisition, environmental pollution, and migrant workers who were owed wages, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in an emailed bulletin.

"Because of his rights defense work, he was fired from his former employer, not able to pass the annual inspection of his lawyer's license, monitored, and beaten," the group said.

Continued house arrest

Yang was also unlawfully detained and beaten for trying to attend blind Shandong activist Chen Guangcheng's court hearing in 2006.

Chen has been held under house arrest along with his wife Yuan Weijing and the couple's two-year-old daughter at their home in Yinan county since he was released from a four-year jail term last September.

However, according to a note written by Yuan and smuggled out to Beijing-based academic Guo Yushan, the couple had suffered considerable injuries from beatings in March, which came after they released a video about their continued unofficial detention.

The note said Chen's mother had been prevented since then from leaving the apartment to buy food, which made life even harder for the family. Their two-year-old child had been prevented from going outside.

According to the note, Yuan and Chen were held down and kicked by government-hired security guards, dozens of whom patrol their hometown day and night, preventing well-wishers and journalists from getting near them.

Guo Yushan declined to comment on Thursday.

"I really can't give interviews, but I can confirm that all this is correct," he said. "I have promised the authorities I won't have contact with the outside world."

Supporter threatened

Chen supporter and online activist He Peirong, known online by her nickname @pearlher, said her family had been threatened by the authorities since she visited Chen's village last month.

"I went to Yinan county four times between May 30 and June 8," He said. "I was kicked out by local officials and went back again and again."

She said Chen's entire extended family was living under threat from local officials. "It's awful," He said. "All their relatives are being threatened."

"The controls around [Chen's home] have been extended," she added. "Before, it was just outside their door, but now it's all the way to the village main street."

Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said the EU talks were unlikely to produce much progress on cases like Yang's and Chen's.

"From the Chinese government's perspective, these human rights dialogues are a means to limit and isolate any discussion about its dismal human rights record at relatively low diplomatic levels," Richardson said in a statement on Thursday.

'The EU has gone along with the script, largely treating the dialogues as business-as-usual talk shops, despite China's escalating crackdowns, detentions, and disappearances of activists,' Richardson said.

Reported by Hai Nan and Grace Kei Lai-see for RFA's Cantonese service, and by Xin Yu, Ding Xiao and Fang Yuan for the Mandarin service.
Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

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