- Mandy Thompson
- Dec 26, 2014
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by zen death robot
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/13/china-targets-lawyers-in-new-human-rights-crackdown
quote:
China targets lawyers in new human rights crackdown
More than 100 legal professionals and activists have been questioned or detained with strong attacks in state media against those affected
More than 100 human rights lawyers and activists have been detained or questioned by Chinese police and denounced in state media as a “criminal gang” in recent days, raising fears of an unprecedented crackdown by the Chinese authorities.
According to human rights groups, a total of 106 lawyers, other staff at legal firms and human rights activists have been detained or questioned and at least three law firms have been searched. Six lawyers from the law firm Fengrui, which has handled a number of high-profile human rights cases, have been detained. Another 17 lawyers and rights activists are missing.
The detentions came as a high-profile Tibetan monk serving a 20-year sentence died in prison and as China was urged to end its two-tier passport system, which restricts freedom of movement for religious and ethnic minorities.
The crackdown began on 9 July when Wang Yu, a Fengrui lawyer, disappeared in the early morning after sending friends a text message saying that the internet connection and electricity had been cut off at her home and that people were trying to break in. Wang’s clients include practitioners of the religious group Falun Gong, which is banned in China.
The firm’s director, Zhou Shifeng, who has also been detained, had represented Zhang Miao, a Chinese journalist who worked with a German magazine to report on the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests and was released last week after nine months in detention.
, a well-known rights lawyer who represented the blind lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng and helped victims of forced evictions, is among those who have not been heard from since being detained.
A large number of the lawyers who have been questioned had signed a public letter condemning Wang’s detention, according to the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, which is based in Hong Kong.
There have been previous government crackdowns on human rights activists and lawyers, including in 2011 during calls for a democratic uprising in the wake of the Arab spring. However, analysts believe this crackdown is unprecedented in terms of its scope. Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said the detention of activists and lawyers was worrying as it was not in response to “any kind of perceivable threat”.
Articles in state media have denounced the Fengrui lawyers and claimed that they illegally organised paid protests and fabricated rumours online to sway decisions in court. A long article in the People’s Daily newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Communist party, detailed how the lawyers and rights activists gain attention for sensitive cases. It accused them of sensationalising ordinary issues, turning “sensitive issues into political issues”, and not following legal principles.
Wang said this kind of public condemnation by state media was unusual, and that activism itself was being used to justify the detentions. Activism “has basically been deemed illegal by the Chinese government”, she said. “I think it is the most concerning part of the crackdown.”
William Nee, from Amnesty International, said Fengrui’s effectiveness in highlighting cases of injustice worried the government. “We’ve seen cases where public opinion seems to have been mobilised and I think they are worried because they don’t want to lose their grip on public opinion.” Protests outside courts by activists had unnerved the government, he added.
“It is something they have never put up with but especially as it looks like social protests are on the rise, strikes are on the rise, there is the potential for economic uncertainty. I think all these factors have together in the government’s mind made them want to crack down on human rights lawyers.”
The US State Department condemned the detentions and said it was concerned that the new national security law was being used as a “facade to commit human rights abuses”. It called on China to “respect the rights of all its citizens and to release all those who have recently been detained for seeking to protect the rights of Chinese citizens”.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on China to ends its use of a two-tier passport system. Under the system, residents from areas that have large Tibetan and Muslim populations have to provide more extensive documentation than other Chinese citizens.
According to HRW, there is a fast-track passport application process for residents in areas populated by the majority Han Chinese that is denied to people in areas populated predominately by Tibetans and Muslims. An HRW report identified cases where members of religious minorities faced delays of five years in getting a passport or were refused one.
“The restrictions also violate freedom of belief by denying or limiting religious minorities’ ability to participate in pilgrimages outside China,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at HRW. Extra restrictions in Tibet since 2012 have stopped most residents travelling abroad, while attending any events in other countries, such as teachings by the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, is considered to be subversive political activity.
A Tibetan lama, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, has died in prison, 13 years into a 20-year sentence for what human rights groups say were false charges that he was involved in a park bombing. He was 65. The cause of death was not clear, but according to a statement by the group Students for a Free Tibet, he had been suffering from serious health problems and had been refused medical parole.
Tenzin Delek Rinpoche was arrested in 2002 for alleged involvement in a bomb attack in Chengu, the capital of Sichuan province, and was initially sentenced to death. His sentence was later suspended and changed to life imprisonment.
Tenzin Dolkar, the executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said: “His death is a harsh reminder of the violent and brutal reality of Chinese-occupied Tibet.”
This is appalling. By any standard, if only China could be a free country, like the US who would never ever do something like thi-
quote:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/13/laura-poitras-sues-u-s-government-find-repeatedly-stopped-border/
Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government to Find Out Why She Was Repeatedly Stopped at the Border
Jenna McLaughlin
July 13 2015, 2:29 p.m.
Over six years, filmmaker Laura Poitras was searched, interrogated and detained more than 50 times at U.S. and foreign airports.
When she asked why, U.S. agencies wouldn’t say.
Now, after receiving no response to her Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to her systemic targeting, Poitras is suing the U.S. government.
In a complaint filed on Monday afternoon, Poitras demanded that the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence release any and all documentation pertaining to her tracking, targeting and questioning while traveling between 2006 and 2012.
“I’m filing this lawsuit because the government uses the U.S. border to bypass the rule of law,” Poitras said in a statement. Poitras co-founded The Intercept with Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill.
She said she hopes to draw attention to how other people, who aren’t as well known, “are also subjected to years of Kafkaesque harassment at the borders.”
Poitras has been the subject of government monitoring since 2006, when she was working on a documentary film, My Country, My Country, that told the story of the Iraq War from the perspective of an Iraqi doctor.
Airport security informed her that the Department of Homeland Security assigned her the highest “threat rating” possible, despite the fact that she has never been charged with a crime. She described the government’s inspection and forceful seizure of her notebooks, laptop, cell phone and other personal items as “shameful” in an interview with Democracy Now in 2012. On one occasion, security officers at the airport refused to allow her to take notes on her interrogation, arguing that her pen could be used as a weapon.
Poitras was only freed from the constant harassment after Glenn Greenwald published an article about her plight in 2012, and a group of filmmakers united to write a petition against the government’s monitoring.
Based on her earlier work, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden picked Poitras, along with Greenwald, to receive his archive of documents, which revealed massive worldwide surveillance by the U.S. and the U.K. Poitras won an Academy Award in 2014 for her documentary about Snowden, called CITIZENFOUR, and shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
In 2013, Poitras filed a Freedom of Information Act request to access any information about herself that the government used to determine that she was a danger to national security and worthy of intense scrutiny.
There is an immense backlog of unanswered FOIA requests across the government. Just this year, the number of unanswered FOIA requests swelled to over 200,000 — over 50 percent more than last year.
Poitras is being represented by lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. “The well-documented difficulties Ms. Poitras experienced while traveling strongly suggest that she was improperly targeted by federal agencies as a result of her journalistic activities,” EFF senior counsel David Sobel told the Intercept. “Those agencies are now attempting to conceal information that would shed light on tactics that appear to have been illegal. We are confident that the court will not condone the government’s attempt to hide its misconduct under a veil of ‘national security.'”
In addition to Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and his husband have also been repeatedly abused by our government, placed on watch lists and other such things for being aggressive defenders of human rights. The TSA no fly list is often, without any recourse been used against other kinds of activists as well. Lets not forget also how the Obama administration continues to have people detained in Gitmo without trial for years and years where officials have said that even if they were to be acquited after having been illegally detained, abducted, and held without legally obtained evidence by the Bush administration as past major candidates for president have vowed to "double gitmo."
When the United States, a country that purports to be a leader on human rights becomes contemptuous of them while still using that as the basis for sanctions, invasions, and punitive measures, they have no place at all to criticize anyone else, such as China. America has abandoned what moral high ground it had. We gently caress up a lot but we once had world wide good will, helping to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. Where have we gone? As glamorized as the constitution is by politicians within the beltway consensus come election time, they are not so keen on recognizing the human rights aspects outside of their pet issues.
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Jul 17, 2015 23:49
