Top Chinese civil rights lawyer bailed
Updated
A prominent civil rights lawyer in China, who has helped families of children who fell ill after taking milk tainted with melamine late last year, has been released on bail. Xu Zhiyong was arrested in June and his legal aid group was shut down over accusations of tax evasion. But the legal aid group - known as Gongmen or Open Constitution Initiative - has tackled many politically sensitive cases.
Presenter: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Sharon Hom, executive director, Human Rights in China, New York
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HOM: Well, Xu Zhiyong teaches at the Beijing University of post and telecommunications. He had also been a former visiting scholar at the China Law Centre at Yale Law School in the US and he in 2003, was elected as a deputy of the Haidian District, the People's Congress, which is the local People's Congress in Beijing and he was re-elected for a second term.
In terms of his prominence, you can really see the prominence in terms of the domestic support for Xu Zhiyong after his detention and up to and through his release on what I guess we could loosely say is bail. There was a campaign to raise money to help pay the fine and, as of last week, collected inside China about 800,000 [yuan] had already been collected and these were mostly donations of very small amounts, of one yuan, two yuan, five yuan, that reflects a kind of popular support for the kinds of public interest advocacy and legal reform work that he and his group were doing.
Also as part of that popular support, you can see that some of the petitioners, like Liu Shasha, who spent 12 days of hunger strike in protest for his release. And then at the other end, an open letter was issued by very prominent Chinese scholars, Jiang Ping and others, who are lawyers, law professors, economists and they essentially asked that Xu Zhiyong be released, and secondly, that Gongmen, his organisation be restored to legal status. So, he clearly is an individual and the work has a broad range of domestic support.
COCHRANE: Now, Sharon Hom, you mentioned that he was a visiting scholar to Yale. Is there a sense that his links to foreign organisations might have got him both in trouble in the first place and perhaps helped to get him out of trouble a bit later on?
HOM: Yeah, I think that both are good observations and I think that is the dilemma many of the domestic NGOs and their working within an extremely restrictive legal framework and it's very difficult for them to get funding. So, I think both having the support of the international community, which also was quite present in his case, helps him to continue, and groups and people like him continue to do the work. At the same time, in this particular case, [international support] provided an opportunity for the authorities to misuse a regulation, in this case tax law to engage in this kind of politicised selective prosecution using what appears to be legitimate regulatory tax purposes and really you can see because they immediately levied five times the penalty which really shows that they went for the highest.
On the other hand, I think we would caution against interpreting this as a release. The sword is still hanging over his head. The charge has not been withdrawn. He was formally arrested on charges of tax evasion earlier this month and those charges are still hanging
COCHRANE: So, do you see this as part of a wider crackdown of NGOs?
HOM: This is part of an ongoing wider crackdown on NGOs, independent voices, efforts by lawyers to have greater independence through direct elections and some of the very good work that lawyers have done. At the same time, we can also see that this particularly in the lead up to the October 1, 60th anniversary. We're also seeing though in this release the impact of both domestic support as well as international attention to his case.
