A prominent Chinese human rights attorney has been charged with “inciting subversion of state power” and will be held in isolation far from his home, his lawyer said yesterday.
Yu Wensheng (余文生), 50, was initially charged with “disrupting a public service” after he was detained by a dozen police officers as he left his Beijing apartment to walk his son to school on Jan. 19.
However, police in Jiangsu Province’s Xuzhou City on Saturday added the more serious subversion accusation, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years, five times longer than the first charge, said his defense lawyer, Huang Hanzhong (黃漢中).
Police also told his family members that Yu would be held under “residential surveillance at a designated place,” Huang said.
Best known for suing the Beijing government over the city’s once chronic pollution, Yu has been a persistent voice for reform, despite an increasingly severe crackdown on activism under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Hours before his detention, he had circulated an open letter calling for five reforms to China’s constitution, including the institution of multicandidate presidential elections.
It is unclear why Xuzhou police became involved, although in recent years, other rights lawyers’ cases were handled by jurisdictions far from defendants’ hometowns.
Under “residential surveillance” rules in cases concerning national security, suspects can be held for up to six months incommunicado in unofficial jails without access to lawyers.
The Xuzhou public security department could not be reached for comment.
“I don’t know if Beijing police will remain involved. After Yu is transferred, I will go to Xuzhou to make a request with authorities to meet him,” Huang said.
Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon (潘嘉偉) said that Yu faces a “high risk of torture and other ill-treatment.”
“The purpose of placing him under residential surveillance with the charge of ‘inciting subversion’ is to silence him for at least six months,” Poon said, adding that police often slap arbitrary charges on human rights defenders.
Yu had said that in 2014 authorities imprisoned and tortured him for 99 days for allegedly “disturbing public order.”
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