Chinese human rights activist jailed for eight years for subversion. By Benjamin Haas
“I will be convicted not because I am really guilty, but because of my refusal to accept a government-appointed lawyer, plead guilty in a televised propaganda confession, and for exposing torture, mistreatment and violence and prosecutorial misconduct”
A prominent Chinese
human rights activist has been jailed eight years in jail for subversion on
Tuesday, the harshest sentence to be passed so far in a government crackdown on
activism that began more than two years ago. Wu Gan, a blogger
better known by his online name of Super Vulgar Butcher, regularly championed
sensitive cases of government abuses of power, both online and in street
protests. He was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of “subverting
state power” at the Tianjin no 2 people’s court. He has been in pretrial
detention for more than two years after staging a protest outside a court.
“The court found that the defendant Wu Gan
became dissatisfied with the existing political system,” according to the
verdict. “Wu Gan has long used information networks to spread a great deal of
rhetoric and to attack state power and the system established by the
constitution.” But Wu was defiant at
his sentencing, pledging to appeal his case and saying he was “grateful to the
[Communist] party for granting me this lofty honour”, according to his lawyer.
He is known for his attention-grabbing protests, at one point posing for a
photo with two knives and saying he would “slaughter the pigs”, referring to
corrupt officials.
On the same day as
Wu’s sentencing, a prominent lawyer Xie Yang was retried but not
punished after he previously pleaded guilty to subversion charges.
While in detention he gave an explosive
account of being tortured, beaten and threatened by interrogators. Xie was arrested more
than two years ago as
part of a sweeping crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists that
saw nearly 250 people questioned or detained by authorities. Wu was detained
two months earlier.
That crackdown
represented an unprecedented attack on lawyers who took on politically charged
cases at the same time president Xi Jinping said he
wanted to strength the rule of law in China.
Rights groups
condemned the sentencing over the Christmas period, a common tactic for Chinese
courts when sentencing high-profile dissidents. Liu
Xiaobo, the Nobel peace prize laureate, who died in custody in July, was
sentenced to 11 years for subversion on Christmas Day 2009.
“It is disgraceful
that the Chinese authorities have chosen the day after Christmas to deal with
two of the remaining people left in legal limbo from the unprecedented July
2015 crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists,” said Patrick Poon, a
researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. “Carrying out unfair trials
and politicized sentencing of human rights defenders at the very time when
diplomats, journalists, international observers and the general public are less
likely to be able to respond reeks of a cynical political calculation”.“By trying to avoid
scrutiny from the press and the international community, the Chinese government
betrays the fact it knows well these sham trials cannot withstand scrutiny,”
Poon added.
Before his trial, Wu
predicted a harsh sentencing for refusing to cooperate with the authorities. “I will be convicted
not because I am really guilty, but because of my refusal to accept a
government-appointed lawyer, plead guilty in a televised propaganda confession,
and for exposing torture, mistreatment and violence and prosecutorial misconduct,”
he said in a
statement released through his lawyers ahead of his trial in August.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/26/chinese-human-rights-lawyer-jailed-for-eight-years-for-subversion