lawyers and activists Xu Zhiyong and ding jiaxi were sentenced to more than ten years in prison after being found guilty of “subverting state power,” the organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced in a statement today.
Ding and Xu were members of the New Citizens movementa network of activists founded in 2012 in favor of government transparency and against corruption in the Asian country.
Xu was sentenced to 14 years by the Linshu County People’s Court in Shandong province, while Ding was sentenced to 12 years by the same court.details the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post.
According to HRW, the trials were held “behind closed doors and were plagued by procedural problems and allegations of ill-treatment”.
The two jurists attended a meeting in the southeastern city of Xiamen in December 2019 to discuss the situation of civil society in China, after which many of their attendees were detained or investigated by the authorities, according to Amnesty. International.
In early February 2020, Xu Zhiyong criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping’s handling of the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic and the anti-government protests in Hong Kong the previous year in a letter.
That same month, Xu was arrested and placed in a state of “monitoring at a designated place” until January 2022, period during which allegedly suffered ill-treatment including long interrogation sessions and being subjected to a so-called “tiger chair” that keeps the limbs immobileaccording to AI.
A similar fate befell Ding, who was arrested in December 2019 and held incommunicado for more than a year, during which he claims to have suffered similar abuses, according to AI.
Shortly after the authorities concluded their investigations in January 2021, Ding and Xu were charged with the crime of subversion against the state.
Both lawyers had already spent between three and four years in prison in the last decade for crimes related to public order disturbance.
“The Chinese government systematically uses national security charges with very imprecise provisions, such as “subverting state power”, to unfairly prosecute lawyers, intellectuals, journalists and human rights activists,” the AI activist denounced at the time. Gwen Lee.
Ding’s wife, Luo Shengchun, who lives in the United States and has been pursuing his case with US State Department officials, told Reuters of the sentence but said she had no further details.
“Their lawyers are prohibited from publishing the documents of the judicial sentences and they do not dare to reveal where they have been sentenced, nor under what charges”he stated by phone.
He will continue to press for information, he added.
“I won’t let Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong be imprisoned so easily.”
“The cruelly absurd sentences and sentences imposed on Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi show the President Xi’s unwavering hostility to peaceful activismsaid Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
China has clamped down sharply on dissent since Xi came to power in 2012. Hundreds of human rights lawyers have been detained and dozens jailed in a series of detentions commonly known as “709” cases, referring to the July 9 crackdown. of 2015.
China rejects criticism of its human rights record, saying it is a country with the rule of law and jailed human rights activists and lawyers are criminals who have broken the law.
(with information from EFE and Reuters)
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