[Four years after President Xi Jinping exhorted the Communist Party to strengthen the rule of law, international observers say the persecution of legal professionals like Wang shows the party-state moving in the other direction. In October, the United Nations Human Rights Council criticized Wang’s detention and called for his release.]
By
Gerry Shih
 |
|
Plainclothes
security officers take away a supporter of Chinese human rights lawyer
Wang
Quanzhang on Wednesday near the Secondary Intermediate People’s
Court
of Tianjin. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
|
BEIJING
— For more than 1,200 days,
the Chinese government sought to build a case against Wang Quanzhang as it held
him incommunicado in secret jails, denying him visits from his family and the
lawyers he requested.
On the day of his trial, Wang struck back: He
denied the government a quick verdict.
A Chinese court in the city of Tianjin said
Wednesday that it held a hearing behind closed doors for Wang, one of the
country’s prominent civil rights lawyers, but could not immediately reveal the
outcome because “state secrets were involved.”
The real reason for the hiccup, Wang’s supporters
say, was more embarrassing for authorities: Wang fired his government-appointed
lawyer soon after his trial began, throwing a wrench into what were supposed to
be swift and scripted proceedings.
Four years after President Xi Jinping
exhorted the Communist Party to strengthen the rule of law, international
observers say the persecution of legal professionals like Wang shows the
party-state moving in the other direction. In October, the United Nations Human
Rights Council criticized Wang’s detention and called for his release.
The story of his unusual day in court
illustrates how the Communist Party uses layers of secrecy and a pliant court
system to enforce its will — and how one individual, despite spending three
years inside the state security apparatus, mounted a fleeting moment of
resistance.
Firing his lawyer “was his way to show
defiance” and “not let the Chinese Communist Party have its way,” said Swedish
human rights activist Peter Dahlin, a longtime friend and collaborator of
Wang’s. “The government tried to make this happen with minimal attention from
diplomatic missions and the media,” he added. “Obviously, this backfired
spectacularly.”
Wang, 42, attracted Beijing’s ire by helping
train and fund a grass-roots network of legal advocates with Dahlin in 2009 to
organize lawsuits and protests to fight land grabs and police brutality. He was
rounded up as part of what became known as the “7-09 crackdown,” when the
government on July 9, 2015, seized more than 200 lawyers and activists in an
unprecedented countrywide sweep to break up the movement.
For months, Wang disappeared into what is
known as a black jail. When police notified Li Wenzu, his wife, that he was
being held for serious crimes, they would not disclose his location or details
of his condition, citing national security.
Since his arrest, seven defense lawyers
appointed by the family — as well as Li herself — have been denied visiting
rights, she said. This summer, the authorities chose a lawyer to represent
Wang.
“My husband was always an innocent man,” Li
said. “They violated the law for so long, by illegally arresting him, by
illegally detaining him for three and a half years, by illegally denying him
lawyers, that now they’re scared to have even an open court because it would
expose the truth — that this is all illegal. That’s why they choose this excuse
that the case touches national security.”
Arguing that the legal defense network was
fanning popular unrest to destabilize the government, China systematically
tried and sentenced more than a half-dozen of Wang’s peers and associates to
five to eight years on subversion-related charges.
In show trials made for television, some
defendants read from scripts.
Other prosecutions turned on confessional
interviews taped for the state broadcaster China Central Television.
Dahlin was detained in early 2016 and
released and deported after being forced to film a confession for CCTV.
That playbook did not work on Wang, the last
holdout of the “7-09” detainees. To the outside world, at least, he did not
provide any indication that he was ready to cooperate with prosecutors, and
starting from dawn on Wednesday, neither did his supporters.
At 5 a.m., in a confrontation witnessed by
reporters, a dozen plainclothes security agents blocked Li as she tried to
leave her Beijing home to attend her husband’s trial in Tianjin, 80 miles away.
By afternoon, authorities had blocked Western
diplomats from attending the hearing and intercepted activists traveling from
remote provinces to voice support for Wang. Outside the courthouse, security
forces seized a demonstrator calling for free elections and Wang’s release and
stuffed him into a black vehicle as foreign news cameras rolled.
By evening, word had emerged that a decision
would be pushed back, without a clear signal that the trial had wrapped up. In
a text message seen by The Washington Post, Wang’s government-appointed lawyer,
Liu Weiguo, told friends he did not know the hearing’s outcome because his
client had dismissed him within the first minute of the trial. Liu could not be
reached for comment.
“This was the most bizarre form of a show
trial imaginable, where they couldn’t even put on a show,” said Jerome A.
Cohen, an expert on Chinese law at New York University. Time and again, the
authorities’ fixation on secrecy, Cohen said, showed “insecurity, not
strength.”
Still, in a country where the government wins
more than 99 percent of the time in court and failed prosecutions are unheard
of in high-profile political cases, Wang will be made to pay. Few among his
supporters expect that he can escape a heavy sentence, much less walk free.
Moreover, human rights groups say his
resistance for three years behind bars may have taken an untold psychological
and physical toll. And it may land him a harsher verdict in a court system in
which a suspect’s attitude — submission or defiance — can outweigh guilt or
innocence.
“Wang may not have bought into the
‘confessing in exchange for leniency’ tactic, and that’s why he has been
detained for so long,” said Doriane Lau, a China researcher at Amnesty
International.
Under Chinese law, suspects in political
cases can be held at undisclosed locations for six months as state security
officials gather evidence — or, as is often the case, extract a confession.
“In this case, we think there was a problem
where prosecutors couldn’t get what they wanted,” Lau said.
In the case of Wu Gan, a blogger associated
with the lawyers’ movement, police detained his parents to force their son to
confess in court or on camera. Wu refused and was tried on Dec. 25, 2017, in a
closed courtroom, where he received an eight-year sentence.
Bärbel Kofler, the German government’s human
rights commissioner, said in a statement that a fair trial for Wang was
“impossible” given that he was denied a lawyer of his choosing. She called on
the Chinese government to prosecute Wang in accordance with due process and
open up the proceedings. “Unfortunately, the public has been denied access not
only to this trial, but also to similar trials for quite some time,” she said.
Outside the murky justice system , Wang’s
family has also borne the toll of his detention.
Since 2016, Li and the couple’s young son
have been under constant surveillance, with state security at one point moving
into an apartment in her building and, in another instance, driving her out of
her rental home.
But Li and other wives of detained “7-09”
lawyers have become savvy media campaigners who strike a rare balance of
staging publicity stunts Chinese authorities appear to loathe, yet generally
treat with a light touch.
In April, Li and her friends walked 60 miles
to Tianjin to demand answers about her locked-up husband before being turned
back. A month later, German Chancellor Angela Merkel invited her to a meeting
during a trip to Beijing as a gesture of support.
With no end to her husband’s ordeal in sight,
Li said she would continue to demand access to his court hearings or to visit.
She intends to demonstrate outside the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing if
Wang’s case continues to stall, she said.
“As a wife, I have the right to know the
truth,” she said. “When the authorities tell me I cannot know this, or I cannot
go there, they never can provide reasons. They just use the logic of having
more power or more bodies to stop me.
“All I can do is persist,” she said. “I will
persist until I cannot anymore.”
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