Chinese legal authorities yesterday formally disbarred a prominent rights lawyer who was handed a suspended sentence last year for writing Internet posts the government said incited ethnic hatred, ending his career.
Activists have said the three-year suspended sentence for Pu Zhiqiang (浦志強) would serve as a strong reminder to other rights lawyers that the Chinese Communist Party, currently engaged in a severe clampdown on dissent, would brook no challenge to its rule.
Pu has represented many well-known dissidents, including artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) and activists of the “New Citizens’ Movement,” a group that has called on Chinese leaders to make their wealth public, and his case has attracted wide concern in Western capitals.
Pu told reporters he had received the formal notification from the Beijing City Judicial Bureau that his lawyer’s license had been revoked. He declined further comment, saying he was not supposed to accept interviews.
Calls to the judicial bureau seeking comment went unanswered.
Fellow rights lawyer and friend Shang Baojun (尚寶軍) said the disbarment had been expected since Pu’s conviction in December last year, because a person found guilty of a criminal offense is not allowed to practice law.
“Unless one day his conviction is overturned, then he’ll never be allowed to practice law again. It’s really the end of his career,” Shang said.
The charges against Pu were based on seven microblog posts that he had published online, criticizing the government’s ethnic policy in the troubled western region of Xinjiang and several officials, according to his lawyers.
The news of the disbarment comes as the US Department of State criticized Beijing’s “severe” crackdown against lawyers and law firms handling cases that authorities consider politically sensitive.
The department highlighted repression against civil society in its annual report on human rights practices around the world, including in a number of authoritarian Asian nations.
The report, released by US Secretary of State John Kerry, covers last year. It says repression and coercion markedly increased in China, and hundreds of lawyers and law associates were interrogated, investigated and in many cases detained in secret locations for months without charges or access to attorneys or family members.
US Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski, a top envoy on human rights issues, said that the repression was a government attempt to project strength, but in fact communicated weakness, as expectations rise among Chinese people who have become wealthier and connected to the Internet.
“Like people everywhere else they want to live in a country where the rule of law is respected and corruption is punished and exposed, and environmental problems are not swept under the rug. They want the same thing as people anywhere else, and the government senses that and it feels insecure and it cracks down,” Malinowski told reporters.
“I think that when we speak out on these issues we are 100 percent aligned with the aspirations of most ordinary people in China,” he said.
The report also criticizes the enforced disappearances of five men working in Hong Kong’s publishing industry, saying Chinese security officials were believed to be responsible.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In recent years, China has responded to the annual US report by issuing its own on human rights problems in the US. Last year, it concluded that racial discrimination and police abuses are rife in the US.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
LAW CONSTRAINTS: The US has been pressing allies to send warships to open the Strait, but Tokyo’s military actions are limited under its postwar pacifist constitution Japan could consider deploying its military for minesweeping in the Strait of Hormuz if a ceasefire is reached in the war on Iran, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi said yesterday. “If there were to be a complete ceasefire, hypothetically speaking, then things like minesweeping could come up,” Motegi said. “This is purely hypothetical, but if a ceasefire were established and naval mines were creating an obstacle, then I think that would be something to consider.” Japan’s military actions are limited under its postwar pacifist constitution, but 2015 security legislation allows Tokyo to use its Self-Defense Forces overseas if an attack,
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
RSS