| Visitors Now: | |
| Total Visits: | |
| Total Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Four Lawyers Arrested on Fabricated Charges in China
A team of four attorneys in Guangxi Province were arrested on charges of “suborning perjury”–inciting clients or witnesses to commit perjury. Chinese media said the arrest of an entire criminal defense lawyer team in a single case is unprecedented in Chinese judicial history.
The four attorneys, Luo Sifang, Liang Wucheng, Yang Zhonghan, and Yang Zaixin of Nanning City in Guangxi Province were defense counsels in the beating death case of Huang Huanhai in Beihai City, Guangxi Province last year, in which four men stood accused of homicide.
During the hearings, the four defense attorneys submitted evidence to the court of police having tortured defendants to extract confessions.
Now the four attorneys have themselves been arrested on charges of “inciting perjury” according to Article 306 of China’s Criminal Code, a law often misused by officials attempting to silence defense lawyers.
Three crime scene witnesses, whose testimony was contrary to the prosecution’s statements, were also arrested in April by the Beihai municipal public security bureau, on charges of giving false testimony, according to a June 21 statement by another Guangxi lawyer, Wu Liangshu, reported by Guangdong’s 21th Century Business Herald.
Two of the attorneys, Yang Zaixin and Yang Zhonghan were taken away by police on June 14, while the other two were arrested later.
The families of Yang Zaixin and Yang Zhonghan have received notification of their criminal detention; the families of the other two attorneys have not yet been notified, according to a blog post by Yang Jinzhu, a lawyer from Hunan Province who had been following the case.
Yang Jinzhu said in a blog that several months before the arrest, he received materials about the case from Yang Zaixin by express mail with the request to defend him. Yang Zaixin repeatedly stated that he did not instigate others to commit perjury.
Yang Jinzhu said that after careful research, he concluded that Yang Zaixin’s actions did not constitute “suborning perjury.”
Yang Xuelin of Beijing’s Sinotrust Law Firm, concurred. “Based on materials published by Yang Jinzhu, the reason for the arrest of the four attorneys was not related to evidence collected for the investigation, but rather that they had discovered and exposed the police extracting confessions through torture,” he told the Business Herald.
Targeting Criminal Defense Lawyers
The charge against the four attorneys follows on the heels of another high profile case, that of famous criminal defense lawyer Li Zhuang, who was similarly charged and sent to prison for 18 months, shocking China’s legal community. Li was released on June 13.
This latest case of the four lawyers’ arrest has caused intense concern in the country’s National Lawyer’s Association. Several key members of the association listened to Yang Jinzhu’s analysis of the case, and a team of lawyers was quickly assembled to offer legal advice for the case, according to Yang Jinzhu’s blog post.
Persecution of criminal lawyers has become common in China. A lawyer from Nanning told the Business Herald that some Nanning attorneys have been privately discussing the matter of refusing to defend criminal cases in the future.
Chen Youxi, director of the Zhejiang based Capital Equity Legal Group, also told Business Herald that a concealed strike [against defending criminal cases] has already transpired inside the legal circle, with the majority of financially well-off lawyers having already desisted in defending criminal defense cases.
Police and Courts Abuse Law
Article 306 is the major provision in Chinese criminal law that hinders lawyers’ work in China, according to Human Rights in China. It allows prosecutors to arrest lawyers on grounds of "perjury" or "false testimony." Lawyers can be targeted as defendants themselves when they are accused of destroying or fabricating evidence, or forcing or inciting a witness to change testimony. These acts are punishable by imprisonment of up to 7 years.
{etRelated 58182}Article 306 is often used by police and prosecutors as a way of intimidating defense attorneys from questioning the validity of confessions [which are often extracted under coercion and torture]. Chinese lawyers have become increasingly more unwilling to take criminal defense cases out of fear of being prosecuted. Statistics indicate that the average number of criminal cases taken on by Beijing lawyers has dropped to less than one per year per lawyer, the Business Herald said.
“The Li Zhuang case clearly reflects the significant risk criminal defense attorneys face in China when taking on cases, and serves as a reminder to them to take measures to protect themselves,” Yang Zaixin said in a June 13 interview with New Tang Dynasty Television, upon Li Zhuang’s release from prison.
Yang, one of the four arrested lawyers, was afraid of becoming another Li Zhuang. In May he left a message with a friend, indicating that the Beihai Municipal Public Security Bureau wanted to frame him for inciting perjury.
“If I don’t post online messages for a while, it would mean that I have been arrested; please give it your attention then,” Yang wrote his friend, according to a June 16 Voice of America report.
{etRelated 57294}Yang has worked for years in the area of rights defense and has represented Falun Gong practitioners and victims of forced demolition and land grabs by state officials. He has been beaten and summoned for questioning by police on numerous occasions and has faced delays of his license renewal in the annual lawyers’ license review and registration process, according to a report by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a mainland Chinese NGO.
Source:
