Prisoner of Conscience – Wang Yu
Jul 23, 2015 • 7:43 pm
Wang Yu 王宇
WangYu
Crime: Creating a disturbance & endangering state security
Length of Punishment: N/A
Court: N/A
Trial Date: N/A
Sentencing Date: N/A
Dates of Detention/Arrest: July 9, 2015 (detained)
Place of Incarceration: Residential surveillance at undisclosed location
Background
“She is a brave, forthright, selfless human rights lawyer. Most of the time she is on the road, seeking justice and defending the rights of wronged individuals, despite authorities having insulted her, stolen her phone, kicked her out courthouses, and even illegally detained her. She was never afraid, and continued to fight against violations committed by the authorities. She does not care for fame, or to make big money, but tirelessly works on many difficult and risky rights cases, in pursuit of legal justice. Her name is Wang Yu (王宇), and she is the pride of Chinese lawyers.”
— Disbarred Rights Lawyer Wang Quanping (王全平)
In the early hours of July 9, 2015, authorities abducted prominent human rights lawyer Wang Yu from her residence in Beijing after they apparently had cut the power in her home. Wang had returned home that morning after taking her husband, Bao Longjun (包龙军), and teenage son, Bao Zhuoxuan (包卓轩), to the Beijing airport. She sent out alerts through her phone about unidentified people trying to break the lock on her apartment around 4 a.m., and has since been out of contact. According to neighbors, guards told them the heavy police presence was a raid on drug dealers and that one person was detained. Both Wang’s husband and son were prevented from boarding their plane and taken away. Bao Zhuoxuan was later handed over to his aunt, while his parents remain in criminal detention without police confirmation of criminal charges or their whereabouts. Wang’s son continued to be summoned and harassed by police while being barred from traveling and threatened not to speak to others. The day after Wang Yu was taken away, police also abducted the director of her law firm, Zhou Shifeng (周世峰), from his hotel room in the outskirts of Beijing and took him away with his head covered.
Soon after Wang Yu disappeared, more than 100 lawyers signed an open letter calling for her release. In response, authorities targeted almost all of them in a nationwide crackdown, setting off rapid police operations that involved abductions, detentions, interrogations, harassment, and threats. Those released from interrogation were warned not to voice support for Wang Yu or any of the detained lawyers. Beijing Fengrui Law Firm, which employs Wang, was the focus of a Xinhua state media article published on July 11 accusing the firm of running a “criminal syndicate” and serving as a platform for masterminding serious illegal activities to incite “social disorder” and gain “profits.” Citing the Ministry of Public Security, Xinhua confirmed the criminal detentions of the law firm’s director, several of its lawyers, paralegals, and administrative staff. Beijing Fengrui Law Firm has employed several of the country’s most courageous lawyers and even renowned activists, such as Wu Gan (吴淦). The raid and crackdown, though unprecedented, were part of a pattern that had been observed for years in China, where authorities have pressured law firms to fire (or simply not hire) rights lawyers.
Wang Yu has frequently been harassed, threatened, searched, and physically assaulted by police since she began to take on rights abuse cases in 2011. Just a week before Wang’s detention, she was protesting procedural violations at a pretrial meeting when a judge ordered her forcibly removed from the courthouse by bailiffs, who caused an injury to Wang’s shoulder. She has represented activists, scholars, Falun Gong practitioners, farmers, and petitioners in cases involving a wide array of issues, including women’s and children’s rights, and the rights to religion, housing, and freedom of expression, assembly, and association.
She has defended ordinary citizens victimized by China’s broken justice system, as well as prominent members of the country’s civil society who have paid a great price for their advocacy work. Wang represented the influential Uyghur scholar and activist, Ilham Tohti (伊力哈木.土赫提), who was sentenced to life in prison in January 2014 for advocating peaceful means to resolve ethnic tensions and to end state repression in Xinjiang. She also defended the late activist Cao Shunli (曹顺利), who died in March 2014 after pushing for years for access to international human rights mechanisms to improve rights conditions in China. Wang has persistently offered assistance amid heightened government attacks against civil society, such as with the detentions of the Five Feminists in the spring of 2015.
While government authorities have attacked Wang Yu for her efforts, her courageous rights defense work has attracted accolades from fellow lawyers. In 2013, China’s legal community, led by an organization called Public Interest Litigation, nominated two of Wang’s cases as “Top Ten Public Interest Cases,” including the case of two female toddlers who had been starved to death in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. Wang and her colleagues filed litigation charges against local branches of the Public Security Bureau, Ministry of Civil Affairs, Community Administrative Division, and All-China Women’s Federation. Even though she did not win the case, the suit generated attention to the issue of insufficient national laws for protecting children. In the other nominated case, Wang provided pro bono representation to a farmer who twice had been forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital in reprisal for petitioning his grievances to the local government. In the end, a settlement was reached despite the perpetrators denying wrongdoing.
Wang Yu has taken on Falun Gong cases around China—including in Beijing, and the provinces of Hebei, Heilongjiang Jiangsu, Jilin, Liaoning, and Shandong—despite the fact that these cases heighten the chance of police mistreatment and retaliation. She assumed precisely this sort of risk when she decided to represent a Falun Gong practitioner illegally detained in the city of Jiansanjiang in Heilongjiang in 2014. In an incident that was widely monitored and condemned by China’s civil society, her client’s previous lawyers had suffered broken ribs after being seized, detained, and tortured for trying to provide legal assistance.
Authorities threw Wang Yu off a case in February 2015 after she filed a complaint against a judge for procedural violations during a hearing where she represented Fan Mugen (范木根) in Jiangsu Province. Fan is a farmer who attacked in self-defense two members of an illegal eviction team who had assaulted Fan and his family while attempting to demolish their home. The two men later died, and Fan was sentenced to eight years in prison when his trial resumed in May 2015, without any lawyer allowed inside the courtroom.
“Now, in fact, you could be detained with a charge of ‘creating a disturbance’ or ‘inciting subversion of state power’ if you say something on the Internet, and get sentenced. Perhaps you can say that is just for Falun Gong practitioners, but really it is also for us, and we should not let the government arbitrarily persecute any citizen. My power is limited, but despite being limited, I hope to make a small impact. Every lawyer who works on human rights cases thinks this way.” — Wang Yu
Born in 1971 in Inner Mongolia, Wang Yu graduated from China University of Political Science and Law in 1994, and began practicing law in Beijing in 2004. Started out as a commercial lawyer, Wang decided to pursue defending human rights after a personal encounter with China’s unchecked police power and failed legal system landed her in jail for two-and-a-half years. In May 2008, Wang got into in an altercation at a train station where staff prevented her from entering even though she had a ticket. Several unidentified men assaulted Wang. The lawyer filed a complaint at the local police station, but seven months later, police detained her for “intentional assault,” accusing her of beating three male personnel at the train station, and sent her to prison. She also was fined 129,377 RMB (approx. $21,500). According to a friend, since Wang’s release from prison in 2011, she has not even fully recovered her physical strength, yet she continued to travel across China fighting to defend others.
Her past imprisonment became the basis for a smear campaign in Xinhua, which published an article on June 11, 2015, portraying Wang Yu as a violent and deceitful lawyer who had refused to pay the financial penalty for her actions. Wang’s colleagues and supporters recognized that the defamation was in fact only further reprisal against the lawyer for taking on another high-profile case in June 2015—representing Wu Gan, the maverick activist who had been detained for criticizing officials. That same month, hundreds of lawyers and activists joined together to lend her funds to help pay off the legal fine, which Wang was not able to do before she was abducted from her home.
Many who know and have worked with Wang Yu describe her as a courageous and fearless “warrior.” She has raced to the frontlines of rights defense work in China to provide legal aid to those in need, regardless of how difficult or politically sensitive a case is.
http://chrdnet.com/2015/07/prisoner-of-conscience-wang-yu/
