Wang Quanzhang: The lawyer who 'simply vanished' By John Sudworth
In August 2015 Wang Quanzhang was detained by the Chinese authorities. In that he was not alone. The nationwide series
of raids that summer saw more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants and human
rights activists brought in for questioning. But almost two years on, Mr Wang
is the only lawyer from whom nothing has been heard at all. "I don't know
whether he's alive or dead," his wife Li Wenzu told me. "I have had
no information at all. He has simply disappeared from the face of the earth. It
is so scary, so brutal."
Li Wenzu fears her husband is being punished for a failure to compromise
China's
"709" crackdown as it's now known - a reference to 9 July, the date
it began - is widely seen as a sign of a growing intolerance of dissent under
President Xi Jinping. Of the large number of people initially detained, around
two dozen have been pursued as formal investigations. Over the past year or so
those cases have gradually been reaching some kind of a conclusion. Some of the accused have been given long jail terms,
of up to seven and a half years, for the crime of subversion. Others have been given suspended prison sentences or
released on bail, but still remain under constant surveillance. But of the lawyers arrested
in that initial 2015 sweep, Mr Wang is unique. Apart from one brief written
notification of his arrest, the family say he has disappeared into a black
hole. "For these two years, he hasn't been allowed to meet the lawyer that
we have employed for him, and he has no right to communicate with the outside
world," his wife Ms Li said. "He has been deprived of all
rights."
There have been
allegations that some of the lawyers have been tortured during
their detention, force-fed drugs, shackled, beaten and kept in stress positions
for long periods of time. Their admissions of guilt, either in
court or in the televised confessions that have been broadcast by state-run TV,
should not be taken at face value, their supporters argue, but rather as the
inevitable consequence of the pressure they've been under. They now fear that
Mr Wang's continued incarceration might be because he is holding out. "I
think it might be because my husband hasn't compromised at all," Ms Li said.
"That's why his case remains unsolved." Wang Quanzhang is
certainly no stranger to pressure. His work representing the persecuted
followers of China's banned spiritual movement, Falun Gong, as well as human
rights activists, has attracted the ire of the authorities before. In this interview, he recounts being
beaten in the basement of a court building for challenging the order of a judge…
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