As one of China’s most celebrated human rights lawyers was tried for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, security officials outside the court pushed and shoved journalists covering the trial.
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Pu’s wife Meng Qun, who has said she is concerned for her husband’s health because he suffers from diabetes and needs daily medication, attended the trial.
“Nothing Pu Zhiqiang has written has violated any law, but the authorities’ treatment of him certainly has”, the group’s China director said.
The trial of the lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, 50, drew wide condemnation, including from foreign governments that sent diplomats to the courthouse in central Beijing to try to observe the proceedings.
Human rights groups described Pu’s trial as “an act of political persecution”, marking another milestone in a continuing crackdown on civil society under President Xi Jinping that has seen activists, lawyers and artists imprisoned.
Pu is accused of “venting his spleen” online and “using humiliating language”, as well as “harming race relations”, according to the charge sheet.
Men in plainclothes – each wearing a yellow sticker with a smiley face – emerged from the rows of police and started separating protesters from reporters, pushing some of the reporters and their assistants.
Teng Biao, a prominent Chinese human rights lawyers and now a visiting scholar at Harvard Kennedy School, at a restaurant in Beijing, China, on August 14, 2013.
Visitors at the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, where the trail was held, included 11 diplomats from countries including the United States, Germany and France besides Pu’s supporters, who had travelled long distances, to show their solidarity for the lawyer. They threw one of the protesters to the ground and took away several others. “If we, as ordinary people in China, don’t speak out, we will be repressed”. In July, authorities rounded up about 200 human rights lawyers in a major nationwide sweep; many of them remain behind bars.
Amnesty International say that is what he is really being punished for – standing up to the Chinese government.
The statement the European Union diplomat attempted to read was that the blocking of observers from the trial raised “serious questions of consistency with China’s constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly, opinion and expression”.
“A simple theory he taught me is that, just like you have the father first and then the son, you have to have legitimate legal procedures – file the case first, gather evidence, prosecute – you cannot prosecute and then find evidence”, said a former client who only gave his surname, Xu, because he feared being arrested for speaking out.
The claims against Pu relate to seven places he made on Sina Weibo between 2014 and 2011.
Pu Zhiqiang had made unflattering comments about some Chinese regime officials in three of his Weibo posts. In another message, Pu mocks Mao Xinyu, Mao Zedong’s grandson.
“Pu Zhiqiang has always been very outspoken on ethnic issues, and that’s what I most admire about him, as a member of an ethnic minority myself”, Xinna told RFA on Monday.
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He faces up to eight years in prison.
