A prominent Chinese human rights lawyer said he was blocked on vague national security grounds from leaving the nation to participate in a US Department of State-sponsored studies program.
Chen Jiangang (陳建剛) on Monday said that he was pulled aside at Beijing airport and told by a customs agent that he was forbidden to leave, but that he was given no detailed reasons or a written explanation.
He said he was told in an earlier conversation with Beijing police that it was because he had represented another lawyer, Xie Yang (謝陽), in a case, and that the US government’s acceptance of him as a visiting academic also made him suspect.
“Who knows what they are up to in getting you to come to the US?” Chen said he was told by a police officer.
Chen said he had planned to fly to the US to study English prior to joining the Humphrey H. Humphrey Fellowship Program.
The program “brings young and mid-career professionals from designated countries to the United States for a year of non-degree graduate-level study, leadership development, and professional collaboration with US counterparts,” its Web site says.
As Xie’s former lawyer, Chen had helped release his client’s account of torture, for which he was himself detained.
Xie was among those detained in China’s “709 crackdown,” in which authorities on July 9, 2015, detained hundreds of independent lawyers and human rights campaigners in a coordinated sweep that sent a chill through the nation’s activist movement.
Xie was released in 2017, along with another lawyer, Li Heping (李和平), after the two allegedly confessed in court to collaborating with foreign organizations and media to smear and subvert Chinese Communist Party rule.
Four months prior to his release, Xie’s family released a jailhouse statement from him saying that he had been tortured and that if he publicly confessed at any point, it would be because he broke down under enormous government pressure and coercion.
Exit bans such as Chen experienced are a frequent form of punishment imposed on critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing justifies them by saying the presence of such individuals abroad could compromise national security.
Chen, who has never been charged with a crime, said he has been barred from leaving China since before the 2015 crackdown, and that the ban was extended in 2017 to cover his wife and two children.
Chen said he would continue to demand the right to exit the nation, calling the order “an abuse of power by the government.”
“It is not only a denial of the basic human rights of a citizen, but also an instance of bias against lawyers and the legal profession. It is the opposite of ‘governing the country according to law,’” he said, quoting a popular government slogan.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) internal security forces have relentlessly pursued a wide range of critics and independent voices, from religious minorities to lawyers, academics, writers, artists and advocates for workers’ and women’s rights.
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