By Jerome A. Cohen
Lawyer Qin Yongpei
Here, to mark the first anniversary of the incommunicado detention of the valiant and imaginative Chinese defense lawyer Qin Yongpei, is the remarkable submission of his plight to no fewer than seven UN human rights offices by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders. CHRD has written a communiqué outlining the timeline of Qin’s arrest and alleging subsequent arbitrary detention and torture.
Qin’s case has followed what by now is a familiar course. First, like many HR lawyers, he was picked up, held, intimidated, warned and released in 2015. When he persisted in carrying out his lawyer’s obligations, in 2018 he was disbarred from law practice and his law firm dissolved. After ingeniously forming an ostensible business consultancy in order to continue their work, he and some disbarred colleagues added to their challenges to the police-prosecutors-judges triumvirate by establishing a “Disbarred China Lawyers Club” that exposed official corruption and abuses of power as well as the environmental depredations of a local mining company. That proved to be the last straw for the targets of his public efforts, and he was then “disappeared” by the targets in 2019. There is as yet, one year later, apparently no further news of him.
What a tangle it must be now for the seven different UN groups, including the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and several Special Rapporteurs, to decide how best to reconcile their overlapping jurisdictions in order to vigorously pursue their duties. Their inquiries may evoke a PRC response and speed up the processing of this typically sad case. Surely it should not continue unnoticed by the world community.