With winter approaching, Xu Yan (許艷) brought some warm clothes and money to a detention center in eastern China for her husband, although she is not even sure the arrested human rights lawyer is still being held there.
Xu, 37, has traveled about 20 times from Beijing to Jiangsu Province’s Xuzhou in a vain struggle to get any information about Yu Wensheng (余文生) after he was taken into custody last year.
Her plight highlights the frustrations, fears and obstacles faced by the families of lawyers and activists who fall foul of the communist authorities and vanish into China’s selectively opaque legal system.
Photo: AFP
Xu returned again this week, joining the line at the Xuzhou City Detention Center with other people bringing plastic bags bulging with thick duvets and sweaters for inmates.
Along with Yu’s lawyers, she then made another failed attempt to get information from court officials.
“I still cannot check where my husband is or the status of his case,” said Xu, crying as she held a photograph of Yu and a sign demanding to see the judge responsible for his case outside the Xuzhou Intermediate People’s Court on Thursday.
“My husband just helps the disadvantaged and marginalized — and you locked him up for two years,” she said, as security guards tried to stop her from protesting.
Yu was detained in Beijing in January last year after he wrote an open letter calling for constitutional reforms.
Xu has received very little information since then.
She was able to have a five-minute video call with him in April last year. That day, she got a notice saying Yu was held in Xuzhou.
Xu only heard from her brother-in-law — and then later from her husband’s government lawyer — that Yu was put on trial in May, but nobody has told her if he was sentenced. Neither Yu nor his lawyers have been able to visit him.
“I feel helpless and also useless,” Xu said. “But in my heart, I’ve never considered giving up.”
It has come at an emotional — and financial — cost.
With no income, Xu is digging into her savings, spending about 150,000 Chinese yuan (US$21,310) over the past year in seeking justice.
Her husband’s detention has also disturbed their middle-school son, who witnessed his father’s arrest and several house searches by the police.
The boy has become more introverted and does not like leaving the house, she said.
“It’s as if he’s not as confident when seeing other people anymore,” she said. “That makes me very sad.”
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense