A Chinese dissident who was arrested after campaigning for the parents of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake will stand trial on state secret charges, his wife and lawyer said.
The abrupt announcement that Huang Qi (黃琦), 45, would be tried came nearly eight months after he was detained as authorities silenced criticism about fragile school buildings that collapsed on children in the May 12 quake.
“This morning I received a phone call from the court ... to ask me to tell Huang Qi’s lawyers that he will be put on trial on Tuesday [today] for illegal possession of state secrets,” Huang’s wife Zeng Li (曾莉) told reporters by phone yesterday.
Later, Huang’s lawyer Mo Shaoping (莫少平) said that the district court in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, had agreed to push back the trial date after attorneys protested they had not been given enough time to prepare.
“The court must warn the defense side three days before,” he said, adding that he did not know when the trial would begin.
Huang was detained in Chengdu on June 10 — about a month after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake left more than 87,000 people dead or missing.
Huang, a long-time rights activist who used the Internet to publicize his causes, had started to campaign for parents whose children were killed when their schools collapsed in the quake.
About 7,000 schools were destroyed, often as nearby buildings stood firm, and relatives of the dead children initially spoke out loudly against the graft they believed led to shoddy construction.
“Up to now, we still have not been able to see the [specific] charges” against Huang, Mo said.
Zeng said Huang’s arrest was a result of his work in the earthquake zone.
“This is because he went to the disaster area a couple of times. He reported on the shoddy schools and reported about the appeals of the parents of the students. So he was arrested and charged with possessing state secrets,” she said.
The ill-defined charge is often used to clamp down on dissent and send activists to prison.
Huang was jailed between 2000 and 2005 on charges of subversion after he set up a Web site that independently investigated government corruption and advocated democracy.
After his release, Huang resumed his rights work and opened the Tianwang Human Rights Center, which claims to be the only non-governmental human rights organization in China.
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