His Fengrui law firm was involved in several high profile cases, including the 2008 tainted baby milk scandal.
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“Zhou Shifeng had always been influenced by anti-China forces” and had hyped cases and made remarks online and offline about “overturning the government”, Xinhua citied prosecutors as saying. Liu Ermin is the wife of one of the arrested activists.
How seriously do Chinese take “confession” videos?
Two other human rights lawyers associated with the Fengrui Law Firm are still awaiting trial, and 20 of the more than 300 human rights activists arrested during the massive crackdown previous year are still being detained.
Zhou is the third 709 detainee to go on trial in Tianjin this week. While many were released within a day or two after questioning, at least 16 remain detained, according to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Roseann Rife, East Asia Research Director at Amnesty, said: “This wave of trials against lawyers and activists are a political charade”.
Prosecutors said he had worked “to encourage lawyers to highlight sensitive cases and hired protesters to disturb the judicial system”.
Shigen, and two colleagues set to be tried in court later this week, were accused of organising “activities that manipulated public opinion and disturbed public order”, prosecutors were quoted as saying by state media. Hu was sentenced to 7 ½ years in prison on subversion charges Wednesday, in the second in a series of cases underscoring the ruling Communist Party’s determination to rein in government critics.
Lawyers Zhou Shifeng, Hu Shigen and Li Heping who are also from the same law firm are expected to also be sentenced this week.
He was among hundreds of activists, rights lawyers and aides taken into custody under a campaign launched July 9, 2015 – which the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said has affected at least 319 people in 24 mainland provinces.
His is the third such trial this week, and his sentence will serve the likely objective to all this: sending a stern warning to those who dare to challenge the government in its own, Communist-Party-run courts.
These trials have been shrouded in a significant amount of secrecy from the beginning, eliciting strong responses from families and friends of the activists, many of which protested outside the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in Tianjin. Yet authorities failed to notify any of the defendants’ family members or lawyers that the trials were taking place, nor did those authorities allow them to attend or represent the defendants. Zhou was the director of the law firm. Outspoken artist Ai Weiwei turned to the firm when he was slapped with a tax evasion case; the firm also represented Ilham Tohti, a scholar from the Uighur ethnic minority who was accused of separatism and sentenced to life in prison in 2014.
On Monday, prominent Fengrui lawyer Wang Yu was apparently released on bail, after a video appeared in which she renounced her legal work.
He thanked the government for looking after him while he was ill and in the hospital.
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Hu, 60, had previously been incarcerated for almost 15 years for advocating democracy in China.
