A coalition of human rights groups and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) yesterday called on Beijing to release the lawyers arrested in Beijing’s “709 crackdown” of 2015 as they marked its third anniversary.
While the crackdown is considered the largest ever on the legal profession in China, it was only the beginning of a series of clampdowns.
As of May 17 this year, more than 321 human rights lawyers and civil rights advocates, as well as members of their families, have been arrested, summoned for questioning, banned from leaving the country and placed under surveillance or house arrest, the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said in a statement yesterday.
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
As part of efforts to raise awareness of the issue, a coalition of human rights groups from around the world last year jointly declared July 9 as Chinese Human Rights Lawyers’ Day, and this year they are honoring Chinese human rights lawyers Wang Quanzhang (王全璋) and Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), Taipei Bar Association director Wang Lung-kuan (王龍寬) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
Wang Quanzhang, who disappeared in July 2015, was charged with state subversion, but no official indictment has been made so far, Wang Lung-kuan said.
Gao’s family members said he disappeared in July last year.
Before that, he was being closely monitored by the Chinese government and was banned from leaving his hometown in Shanxi Province after completing a three-year prison sentence for defending Falun Gong practitioners.
As a member of the international community and China’s neighbor, Taiwan can do more to help support Chinese human rights advocates, Wang Lung-kuan said.
“A draft refugee act is already under review at the Legislative Yuan and as far as we know neither the DPP nor the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is opposed to it. The bill should be passed as soon as possible,” he said.
Last month, Chinese dissident Huang Yan (黃燕), who has been granted refugee status by the UN, came to Taiwan seeking political asylum, which shows that Taiwan can provide much-needed help to Chinese political refugees, he added.
Taiwan can also better support Chinese political dissidents by protecting their freedom of speech, assembly and other rights while they are in the nation, Taiwan Association for Human Rights secretary-general Chiu Ee-ling (邱伊翎) said.
A number of Taiwanese have allegedly been recruited by Chinese authorities to collect evidence against Chinese dissidents engaging in pro-democracy activities in Taiwan, she said.
“Evidence collected by Taiwanese led to the conviction of Chinese human rights lawyer Zhou Shifeng (周世鋒) and human rights advocate and pastor Hu Shigen (胡石根) on charges of state subversion,” Chiu said.
“They were sentenced to seven and seven-and-a-half years in prison respectively. However, the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office decided not to press charges [against the Taiwanese] on grounds that they were not government employees and their actions were unrelated to national security,” she said.
Taiwan’s defining difference from China is being a democracy that values freedom and human rights, Yu said. “If we cannot stand up to fight for such values, how can we ask other nations to do the same for us?”
In a joint statement issued yesterday, Yu and more than 50 civic groups and political organizations from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands and the US — including the Judicial Reform Foundation, Japan’s Human Rights Now and the Netherlands’ Lawyers for Lawyers — urged Beijing to immediately release all human rights lawyers arrested during the crackdown.
Beijing should also reverse their guilty verdicts, return their license to practice law and end all forms of political repression against them, they said.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS