A Chinese court yesterday sentenced two prominent human rights lawyers to prison terms of more than a decade each, a relative and rights groups said, the latest move in a years-long crackdown on civil society by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Xu Zhiyong (許志永), 50, and Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜), 55, were put on trial behind closed doors in June last year on charges of state subversion at a court in Shandong Province, relatives said at the time.
Xu and Ding are prominent figures in the New Citizens Movement, which sought greater transparency into the wealth of officials and for Chinese to be able to exercise their civil rights as written in the constitution.
Photo: AP
Ding’s wife, Luo Shengchun (羅勝春), who lives in the US and has pursued his case with US Department of State officials, told Reuters about the sentencing, but said she had no further details.
“Their lawyers are forbidden from publishing court verdict documents, and they do not dare to reveal where they were sentenced and under what charges,” she said by telephone.
She would keep pressing for information, she added.
“I will not let them put Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong in jail so easily,” Luo said.
Xu received a jail term of 14 years and Ding was sentenced to 12 years, she said.
The court and the Chinese Ministry of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two had been held for more than three years, with Ding taken by police in December 2019 shortly after attending a gathering in southern China with about 20 other lawyers and rights advocates.
Then he was held incommunicado for almost six months while being routinely tortured to extract a confession, his lawyer told the court.
Xu, a close friend of Ding’s who once wrote a searing open letter calling on Xi to step down, was detained in February 2020 after going into hiding.
Authorities have barred their lawyers from contact with foreign media, Luo said, in a practice that has become increasingly common so as to stifle publicity around rights-related cases.
Both had previously been imprisoned for their activism.
“The cruelly farcical convictions and sentences meted out to Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi show President Xi’s unstinting hostility toward peaceful activism,” said Wang Yaqiu (王亞秋), a senior China researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Their secret hearings were “riddled with procedural problems and allegations of mistreatment,” the rights group said.
China has dramatically clamped down on dissent since Xi came to power in 2012.
Hundreds of rights lawyers were detained and dozens jailed in a series of arrests commonly known as “709” cases, referring to a crackdown that started on July 9, 2015.
China rejects criticism of its human rights record, saying it is a nation with rule of law and that jailed rights lawyers and rights advocates are criminals who have broken the law.
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