Prominent rights lawyer Li Heping, who has been held in detention since the “709 crackdown” in July 2015, received a sentence of three years in prison but with a four-year suspended sentence, and deprivation of his political rights for four years, for subverting state power in a secret trial followed by a public sentencing on April 28.
Video statement by Wang Qiaoling and Li Wenzu, April 28, 2017
Li’s wife, Wang Qiaoling, and Li Wenzu, the wife of detained lawyer Wang Quanzhang, issued a powerful and revealing video in response (watch here; see here for the translation by China Change). Both women have been outspoken throughout their husbands’ detention.
Beijing is facing a new phenomenon – the effective outrage of the brilliant and courageous wives of tortured human rights lawyers. One can only admire the bold stand of these long-suffering women.
Moreover, their statement of today lays bare a relatively unknown punishment for “released” activists and their families – “house arrest” for the entire family but not in their house but in that of the police. And without even the formal fig-leaf of the Criminal Procedure Law’s “residential surveillance”, which the police have been using more and more to lock up human rights lawyers in incommunicado detention for initial periods of six months.
Perhaps the righteous collective opposition of these and other spouses of detained human rights lawyers and activists has inspired the continuing public protests in Taiwan by the able wife of Lee Ming-che against her activist Taiwan husband’s detention on the Mainland since he was “disappeared” on March 19. This has given Beijing another well-deserved headache, one that is having a big negative impact on cross-strait relations.