Lawyers Call for Legal Reforms to Limit Use of Illegal Measures Against Chinese Colleagues

Chinese authorities made extensive use of extra-legal measures in a crackdown that targeted rights lawyers and legal activists this year, the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers said in a report released today. The measures used to silence an unprecedented number of rights lawyers and other activists signal a shrinking space for legal activism and advocacy that may leave their clients—already vulnerable individuals and groups—with far fewer advocates. The Committee calls on the international community, including lawyers, bar associations, and academic institutions, to stand with them and urge the Chinese government to increase protections for lawyers so that they may carry out their professional responsibilities without fear of reprisal.

The report, Legal Advocacy and the 2011 Crackdown in China: Adversity, Repression, and Resilience, details the escalation of punitive action taken against rights lawyers, legal activists, and other activists in China since February 2011 (see Graphic 1: Anatomy of a Crackdown), including through enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, physical and mental abuse, and intimidation and harassment, signaling. Many of the individuals profiled in the report represent a vanguard of lawyers that take on the most difficult and politically sensitive cases in China, including cases of religious freedom, freedom of expression, access to housing, environmental justice, and access to information. The 2011 crackdown disabled this community through disruption and isolation, both physical (through extra-legal detentions and forced relocations) (see Graphic 3: Fragmenting Community through Relocations) and virtual (by silencing online discussions, including over Twitter) (see Graphic 2: Lawyers Tweeting the 2011 Crackdown).

Rights lawyers represent a comparatively small part of China’s legal community but play a fundamental role in the system, representing the most vulnerable groups and individuals. Attacks that target these lawyers leave others without a legal defense and threaten the Chinese legal profession as a whole. By September 2011, many of the lawyers targeted since February began to re-emerge publicly, but the comprehensiveness of the crackdown, coupled with draft amendments to the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law that would expand police detention powers if adopted, hints at a possible systemization of these measures to silence rights lawyers and other activists in future.

Graphic 2: Lawyers Tweeting the 2011 Crackdown

The Committee’s report considers cases of individual lawyers and analyses their experiences using both international human rights law and domestic Chinese criminal and criminal procedure law. It concludes with a series of targeted and detailed recommendations. These include recommendations aimed at the international community that seek to promote the rights of lawyers as a professional group inside China. The Committee also calls on the Chinese authorities to review and investigate the cases of individual harassed rights lawyers; investigate cases where the use of extra-legal measures have been documented; and bring domestic laws related to criminal defense and the rights of lawyers into conformity with international standards.

The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers (www.csclawyers.org) is a group of independent lawyers from outside China whose goal is to support lawyers in China in their quest to strengthen the rule of law there.

The Executive Summary and Summary of Recommendations of Legal Advocacy and the 2011 Crackdown in China: Adversity, Repression, and Resilience, is available here.