Pu, 50, has been in custody for 19 months on charges of “picking quarrels”, “provoking trouble” and “inciting ethnic hatred” in a series of posts he made on Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter.
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In them, Pu comments on the cover-up the a deadly high-speed rail crash, mocks members of the Chinese Communist Party, and criticizes the government’s handling of Tibet and Xinjiang.
BEIJING (AP) – Security agents forcibly kept dozens of people away from the Beijing court where rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang stood trial Monday, and authorities roughed up at least five protesters before taking them away in vehicles.
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”.
Pu’s online messages were mostly remarks critical of the government’s handling of an ethnic conflict in Kunming, Yunnan province, previous year and sarcastic comments about two officials. One posting that was circulating on social media featured a picture of Pu Zhiqiang with his lips zipped shut. It was not clear when a verdict and sentence would be issued.
But ethnic Mongolian rights activist Xinna rejected the claims of incitement to ethnic hatred against Pu, saying he is being put on trial for criticizing Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minorities.
Several officers dressed in plainclothes and wearing freakish smiley face stickers manhandled journalists at the scene, pushing, punching and even slamming them to the ground.
“China has too few good lawyers – he was one of the few”, Yao Lianshe, a citizen who says he goes to as many trials as he can despite frequent police harassment, told AFP.
The lawyers are arguing that there is no need for Pu’s prolonged detention, because he doesn’t represent a danger to society, and have out at repeated delays and extensions to his stay in Beijing’s police-run No. 3 Detention Center. “If they decide to be harsh against him, I’d say it’ll signify a further escalation of hostility towards human rights activism”, Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said.
Shang said Pu admitted in court that his microblog writing style was “sharp, caustic and sometimes vulgar” and was willing to apologise.
Rights groups fear he faces up to eight years in prison.
He urged China to end what he called its “continuing repression” of human rights lawyers and expressed concern about the “vague charges” against Pu Zhiqian.
Small protests outside of the Second Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing were broken up by authorities.
“The trial of Pu is extremely sensitive”.
Said Xu, the former client: “Pu Zhiqiang told me, ‘You must believe in justice'”.
Authorities detained Pu in May after he participated in a private commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when government-dispatched soldiers opened fire on peaceful pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds.
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.
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American Ambassador to China Max Baucus last week released a statement that specifically called for Pu’s release.
