The living state of lawyers is the state of human rights

 

The living state of lawyers is the state of human rights

 

hello everyone.

My name is Chen Jiangang, 2 years ago I was a human rights lawyer in China, and my Law firm was in Beijing. I have been a lawyer for 12 years, including 10 years representing human rights cases. In 2009, I represented my first human rights case, helping a client protect their family's house from the government. The last case I represented in 2019 was to help an American citizen, Fiona Huang. The Chinese government did not allow me to represent Fiona and asked me to quit the case. I replied that I would never quit, and the Chinese government issued death threats to me. So, in July 2019, I took my wife and children out of China. ChinaAID and Chinachange saved us. Behind the living conditions of human rights lawyers lies the human rights situation and the judicial situation in China. What I am talking about today is the personal experience of myself and my lawyer friends.

first, China has laws but no rule of law. The Chinese law is a tool for the CCP to rule China and a torture tool to suppress human rights lawyers and dissidents.

Over the past 40 years, the CCP set up a complex legal system, but the CCP is the ruler in China, is the law maker, executive and judicial judge. Three kinds of powers in the hands of the CCP, under this system, China's judicial system is the CCP's slaughter knife to the people. The party has made no secret of its determination of the judiciary as a tool of repression. It defined the judiciary as a tool of repression when it seized power 70 years ago. Now Xi Jinping said: “The CCP must cultivate a political and legal team that is loyal to the party and ensure that the knife is firmly in the hands of the party." Under the judicial system that aims at repression, there are countless political prisoners, ideological prisoners, and prisoners of belief in China. The CCP officially classified five categories of people, including human rights lawyers, underground religions, dissidents, Internet leaders, and disadvantaged communities, as "representatives of American anti-China forces subverting China," which are the new black five categories in the Xi Jinping era. The Chinese have been deprived of the right to believe, speech, resistance, and even the right to appeal for unjust cases. These people are all targets of repression. In my more than ten years of professional experience, I have defended a large number of political prisoners. Of course, under the CCP’s judicial system, I cannot win. The result is that I have also become a political prisoner and the CCP’s target for elimination.

Second, the CCP Government restricts lawyers from representing political cases, or even deprives lawyers of their cases

The CCP government restricts lawyers from representing cases involving national security, religious beliefs, mass incidents, etc., and prohibits lawyers from sending any information on cases. In recent years, many lawyers have been fined or even revoked their lawyer's licenses for expressing personal opinions.

There is now a tendency for the CCP to simply strip lawyers of their cases. The method is to forbid the lawyer to meet with the person after arrest, forbid the family members and the person to appoint a lawyer, and then require the person to accept a lawyer appointed by the government. Even if a family member has a lawyer, the CCP can still ask the client to cancel the appointment. Since 2015, this has been the norm. For example, the Chinese government explicitly prohibits lawyers from representing cases related to COVID 19. The Bureau will instruct law firms and Directors of law firm to strictly suppress and control sensitive lawyers and prohibit them from handling sensitive cases. Once a lawyer is banned from working, it will put the lawyer family into financial crisis.

Third, the CCP government can arbitrarily obstruct the practice of lawyers and use various means to destroy the normal life of lawyers

The CCP has imposed various obstacles on lawyers' handling of cases, such as refusing lawyers to meet the defendants without any justifications, denying them access to their papers, denying them permission to speak in court, forcing them to go through security checks, frisking them, and even preventing them from entering court sessions. There are also direct beatings of lawyers, illegal seizure of lawyers' equipment for handling cases, and even illegal detention, torture, formation of charges and even imprisonment. The cases are numerous, and I have been a victim myself.

The CCP will destroy everything about a lawyer and his family in order to force them to obey, leaving them in immediate trouble. These often involve forcing lawyers to move; Cut off the water, power, gas and Internet of the lawyer's family, and cut off the telephone of the lawyer and his family; Threatening all lawyers' family members, banning their children from school, and so on. I and many other human rights lawyers have experienced this firsthand. It is a painful experience. We can imagine how we can live when we move more than five times a year, our children are not allowed to go to school, the electricity and water in our homes are cut off, and the locks are often glued and cannot be opened.

Four, cancel the lawyer's license, revoke the license, dissolve the law firm, let us lose the lawyer qualification

Among human rights lawyers in China, a large number of lawyers were eventually deprived of their lawyer licenses by the CCP government in various names. I myself and a large number of my lawyer friends, who are well-known human rights lawyers and human rights defenders, were deprived of their lawyer licenses, and a number of law firms were dissolved. In the past five years or so, dozens of well-known human rights lawyers have been deprived of their licenses and lost the opportunity to continue working. Seven days later, Beijing lawyer Liang Xiaojun will have his lawyer's license revoked. He is the newest one.

Fifth, Torture, imprisonment, insulting media coverage.

Dozens of Chinese lawyers have been given guilty by the CCP for their involvement in human rights cases, such as 比如高智晟、李和平、王全璋、謝陽、江天勇, and Wang Yu, who just won a Women of Courage Award from the US government. All of these arrested lawyers have been tortured and reported in insulting ways by the CCP's media. The CCP also humiliates lawyers by attributing shameful charges, such as "visiting prostitutes". The CCP government will force political prisoners to confess guilt or perform other performances on TV, such as asking political prisoners to say, "I have not been tortured, and the CCP government is legally handling the case."If you understand this, you can know that the recent Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai's performance on the Internet, including the call with the chairman of the Olympic Committee, is a forced performance.

Sixth, the CCP controls lawyers by keeping family members as hostages, and some lawyers have been jailed for long periods or even disappeared.

In persecuting lawyers, the CCP controls the lawyers themselves by holding family members, especially children, as hostages, a tactic that has become common since 2015, with almost all persecuted lawyers and their families barred from leaving the country or even their children going to school. In my own case, in May 2017, my whole family was arrested and the police held the barrel of a pistol to the heads of my two sons, aged 6 and 2, in front of me. Then, for more than two years, the Beijing police put my home under 24-hour surveillance. The police told me in no uncertain terms that my children were their hostages. Individual lawyers, such as Gao Zhisheng and Jiang Tianyong, have been jailed for long periods or even disappeared.

I can't cover all the ways in which the CCP persecutes lawyers, because the CCP controls everything in China and has unlimited power. There are countless ways in which they can persecute lawyers.

Finally, I want to explain that anti-human rights, anti-rule of law, and anti-constitutionalism are the essence of the CCP, and you should never trust the CCP. The CCP not only does this in China, it also applies this persecution of human rights to other countries, such as the incident that just happened in the United Kingdom, where Hong Kongers in the United Kingdom were beaten by Chinese from China, and this kind of thing often happens in the United States. Many people were threatened and even beaten. The CCP is exporting the CCP’s dictatorship model to the world. The CCP’s dictatorship is a huge threat to world peace and freedom.

Jiangang Chen

2021-12-8