A second mainland Chinese lawyer who represented a Hong Kong democracy advocate on Tuesday was stripped of his license, as Beijing attempts to crush opposition to its tighter control over the territory.
Ren Quanniu (任全牛), who represented one of 12 Hong Kongers who tried to flee to Taiwan, said that he had his license revoked by China’s Henan Provincial Department of Justice.
Ten of the 12 activists caught at sea in August last year were sentenced by a court in Shenzhen in December last year to prison terms from seven months to three years, for crossing the border illegally and organizing the crossings.
The two others were minors.
Thousands of Hong Kongers have fled the territory since Beijing’s imposition of a tough National Security Law that some say is destroying the territory’s civil liberties.
Since the law was introduced in response to anti-government protests that began in 2019, dozens of democracy advocates have been arrested or detained.
The Henan justice department held a hearing on the license revocation in the provincial capital of Zhengzhou on Friday last week, said other lawyers who turned up to support Ren.
They were not allowed into the hearing.
Ren is the second lawyer to have his license stripped by the authorities for handling the cases. Two weeks earlier, judicial officials in Sichuan Province took away the license of Lu Siwei (盧思位), another lawyer on the case.
The US expressed concern over the decision to revoke the lawyers’ licenses.
“We’re deeply concerned by the People’s Republic of China’s attempts to disbar and harass human rights lawyers Lu Siwei and Ren Quanniu for representing the Hong Kong 12,” a US Department of State spokesman said in a statement on Twitter yesterday.
“We urge Beijing to respect human rights and the rule of law, and to reinstate their legal credentials at once,” he said.
Ren was told that comments he made in court in a case in 2018 defending Falun Gong practitioners had caused a “negative impact on society,” the Henan justice department said in a notice to Ren.
A Henan justice department official declined to comment on the case, saying via telephone that the department does not deal directly with media.
Ren has years of experience in handling human rights cases.
Most recently, he represented Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan (張展), who was sentenced to four years in prison in December last year for attempting to report on the situation in Wuhan during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic early last year.
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