One of China’s most prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was sentenced to three years in prison with a three-year reprieve on Tuesday for social media posts critical of the Chinese government.
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His wife, Meng Qun, wrote: “He’s well and still under residential surveillance”.
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Shang said Pu had not pleaded guilty.
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However, Shang said Pu did not plead guilty. Though the government of President Xi Jinping has emphasized the rule of law, the latest ruling is a clear indication that Beijing’s rule of law is inherently differently from that practiced in Western nations.
He accepted the ruling and will not appeal, state broadcaster CCTV said.
Pu continued posting provocative content despite repeated warnings from web administrators, which demonstrated his clear intent to stir ethnic hatred, the court said.
Police and plainclothes security officers prevented foreign reporters, Pu’s supporters and diplomats from the United States, the European Union and Switzerland from approaching the court.
Awaiting the verdict in a nearby cafe out of way of police, supporter Xu Chongyang said: “I’m devastated”. Some foreign journalists also had their press cards confiscated until they left the scene.
It added that of the around 20 people escorted away, at least four were now detained without access to attorneys while five had allegedly not been heard from.
China’s foreign ministry, however, rebuffed such views.
“From the beginning this is a case where people do not know whether to laugh or cry”, he said.
Among them, Wang and Zhang are being held on charges of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble”, activists said. “He has paid a heavy price for exercising his freedom of speech”, the group said in a statement, calling for an end to China’s ongoing persecution of human rights lawyers. “Either way, we would support him”, he said. In July, authorities detained more than 300 rights activists and lawyers as the campaign against dissent spread.
Human rights group Amnesty International has also condemned the guilty finding, while welcoming suspension of the sentence.
According to Xinhua, the court ruled that those posts inflicted negative impact on society, given that Mr. Pu, as a professional lawyer and public figure, “wielded a certain degree of influence online”.
In the posts stretching back to 2011, Pu criticised China’s assimilation policies in the restive province of Xinjiang, home to a large ethnic minority population of Uighurs.
The “incitement to racial hatred” charge was based on a number of tweets he sent in the aftermath of the March 1, 2014, knife attack at Kunming railway station, which left 29 people dead and more than 140 injured.
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Pu was arrested in May 2014 as part of a wider nationwide crackdown on dissidents after attending a meeting to discuss commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a taboo topic in China.
