ternational jurists, lawyers ask China to free human rights lawyers/ENG

2016. január 19./Phayul.com/TibetPress

eredeti cikk

DHARAMSHALA, January 19: Prominent human rights lawyers and jurists including a former French minister have called on the Chinese President Xi Jinping to end the crackdown on human rights lawyers who are “intimidated, interrogated, detained and forcibly disappeared.”

In an open letter published by the Guardian, lawyers including former French justice minister Robert Badinter, top British human rights lawyers such as Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, Michael Mansfield QC and Clive Stafford Smith urged Xi to prove China as a ‘respected superpower’.

“Twelve lawyers and legal assistants remain under criminal detention or arrest. Most of those under arrest are suspected of ‘subversion of state power’ or ‘inciting subversion of state power’. None of them have so far been allowed access to counsel, friends or family, and they are effectively disappeared,” they wrote in the letter.

The letter also expressed concerns over the lack of legal representation and other legal protections, putting the rights lawyers at higher risk of torture or other cruel and inhuman treatment.

They also urged China to be a responsible stakeholder in the international community and honor its international commitments by heeding to all the requests put forward in their letter.

The arrested lawyers are charged with subversion of state power” or “inciting subversion of state power”. Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer who won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, was charged for subversion of state power, and is currently in Chinese prison.

According to a 2015 report published by Freedom House, human rights condition under Xi has deteriorated. The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) also marked the year 2015 as ‘another punishing year for human rights in China’.