share information on human rights defenders, with special focus on human rights awards and laureates
Perhaps one should be ‘grateful’ that China on 3 January 2016 decided to detain the Swedish human rights campaigner Peter Dahlin (first foreigner to be detained for ‘endangering state security’) as this helped international media the take note of the extraordinary crackdown by Chinese president Xi Jinping who is now widely considered to be China’s most authoritarian leader in decades. Here a short overview of the most notable cases in the first two weeks of 2016:
On 6 and 7 January 2016, human rights lawyers Mr Sui Muqing and Mr Huang Liqun in China were released from police custody reports Front Line Defenders on 7 January. The two human rights defenders were detained on 10 July 2015 in the midst of a nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers [https://thoolen.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/the-remarkable-crackdown-on-lawyers-in-china-in-july-2015/] and placed under ‘residential surveillance at a designated location‘. Article 73 of the Criminal Procedure Law allows for the detention of suspects in state security, terrorism and serious bribery cases for up to six months in undisclosed locations, under the guise of ‘residential surveillance’. The authorities are not obliged to specify the place of detention or notify the suspect’s relatives or legal representative of the reasons for the residential surveillance in cases relating to the three charges, if doing so may “interfere with the investigation”. Neither of the human rights defenders were permitted access to lawyers during their six months’ detention. https://frontlinedefenders.org/node/29112
(Sui Muqing is a Guangzhou-based human rights lawyer who has represented a number of other human rights defenders, including Guo Feixiong, and has suffered harassment, intimidation and travel bans as a result of his work. Huang Liqun is a human rights lawyer with Beijing Fengrui Law Firm, a firm specifically targeted by the authorities in Beijing. Six other lawyers with the firm remain in detention).
Up to 20 other human rights defenders in the July crackdown are still in detention.
On 10 July 2015 over 250 lawyers and support staff were detained or questioned by the police in China in one of the largest crackdowns in recent years. Many newspapers and NGOs have reported on this phenomenon. This is the situation on 29 July: Read the rest of this entry »
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 