Human rights lawyer Wang Quanzahgn reunites with family after his “non-release release”. But under what conditions?

By Jerome A. Cohen

It is indeed great news that Wang Quanzhang has finally been allowed to return to Beijing and his family. Many who supported him and his human rights cause for five years will be moved by the video of the family reunion.

The significance of Wang’s release from “non-release release” (伪释放) in Jinan after a week of the Party’s uncertain waffling in the unusual glare of foreign media has yet to be determined, of course. What are the conditions, if any, of his return to Beijing?

Did his dynamic, gallant wife manage to resist the usual pressures to keep the ex-prisoner at home cut off from the world? Was her illness and hospital trip the straw that broke the Party’s back? Will Wang, having already had unusual access to people and media in Jinan, continue to have such access in Beijing? The Party may decide it’s too late to lock the barn door. Will he now actually be freer to tell the full story of the cruelty inflicted upon him so unfairly by the Party’s criminal justice system?

And might this case indicate recognition by the Party that the police should not have unlimited discretion in determining the scope of post-conviction “deprivation of political rights” (DPR)? After all, as the Soviet origins of this largely unrecognized punishment demonstrate, DPR was thought by many merely to deprive an ex-convict of the rights to vote and stand for election, not an enormous deprivation given the realities of Communist politics.

Update on lawyer Wang Quanzhang and “deprivation of political rights”

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is an update on the weird and fascinating “non-release release” (NRR) of the famous, disbarred human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, who is being prevented from returning to his home and family in Beijing and kept in his former residence in Jinan (the police having ousted the tenant who was renting from Wang) but allowed some contacts with his sister, a friend and some non-PRC media.

A local Jinan police station official told his sister that Wang is required to stay there because he is under sentence of “deprivation of political rights” (DPR) for the five years after his “release” from almost five years in prison. This would be a far-fetched interpretation of the criminal punishment of DPR, as I pointed out in my last week’s pre-release op-ed in the SCMP.

Wang’s tenacious and brave wife, Li Wenzu, has openly ridiculed this DPR argument in a tweet that has evoked a large variety of interesting responses. Her evolving and well-publicized challenge to the administration of criminal justice will undoubtedly lead to a clarification of the scope of DPR in the next revision of China’s criminal legislation. The fuss made over Ai Weiwei’s illegal detention in 2011 led to a 2012 revision of criminal legislation relating to “residential surveillance at a designated location” (RSDL), which the police have subsequently abused by their unjustified nullification of the limits on RSDL imposed by the new provisions.

Reunion of Wang Quanzhang and his sister, April 21, 2020, Credit: Wang Quanzhang’s wife Li Wenzu’s twitter @709liwenzu

Glimpse into rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang’s “Non-Release Release”

By Jerome A. Cohen

Rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has not been free after his April 5 “release”. In the past two days, Mimi Lau of the South China Morning Post and William Yang of Deutsche Welle were able to reach Wang and published valuable interviews that offered unusual glimpses into the plight of this courageous lawyer (SCMP interview; Deutsche Welle).

Wang said he’ll challenge the unfair prosecution against him. Questions remain: How can Wang now do that? Has he yet been given belated copies of the prosecution’s indictment and the court’s judgment, as required by law even in secret trials? Can he now choose independent counsel to assist and meet with him? If his wife and colleagues were unable to access the legal system to defend his rights for almost five years, can he and they now do better? Here is my take in the Diplomat, Wang Quanzhang and China’s ‘Non-Release Release’.

Wang Quanzhang, April 20, Credit: Li Wenzu’s twitter @709liwenzu

China's continuing repression of human rights lawyers amidst—and under the pretext of—Covid 19

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here's my op-ed in today's SCMP, China should not use the coronavirus as an excuse to silence human rights activists like Wang Quanzhang. "Covid-19 has outlived its use as an excuse for repression. This time the world is watching, so the party faces a challenge to its ingenuity, or at least its brazenness."

Growing international protest against China’s "Non-Release Release" of rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang

This may be a rare opportunity to press the PRC to make a humane human rights decision. Will the world seize it?

By Jerome A. Cohen

While striving mightily to overcome the blow that its handling of the Coronavirus has dealt its aspirations for “soft power”, the Chinese party-state is now confronted by a new dilemma — the rising tide of international protests against the continuing confinement of famous human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang following his formal release from almost five years in prison on Sunday.

The PRC’s now customary modus operandi is to ostensibly release Chinese human rights lawyers after completion of their long terms of wrongfully-imposed criminal punishment, but then immediately deprive them of their freedom forever via the application of comprehensive secret police measures, including total disappearance, that assure their enduring silence. This is what I have long called the “Non-Release Release”, what has until recently been a low visibility, low political cost, extralegal procedure that has done less damage to the PRC’s public image than a formal criminal sentence to life in prison or the death penalty might occasion.

But the current Wang case presents a challenge to this horrendous practice. The PRC’s too clever resort to the excuse of needing to shelter Wang for a post-release 14-day Coronavirus testing period has begun to focus international attention on what his gallant wife Li Wenzu has rightly condemned as its shameful NRR practices. This has given world opinion a rare chance to influence a PRC human rights decision.

What will the PRC do with Wang at the end of 14 days? Announce that he needs yet another 7 days of further surveillance? He had already tested negatively five times for the virus before his departure from prison! And how will it justify the continuing prohibitions on his electronic as well as personal contacts after that period? Will it claim that his sentence to a five-year deprivation of his political rights following prison release requires his total exclusion from all society? Given the gradual mobilization of public opinion, both inside and outside China, against disgraceful persecution of a courageous lawyer and human rights, what will be the calculation of PRC propagandists and leaders?

Wang Quanzhang (left) and his wife Li Wenzu with their son in 2015. Photo: AP

Li Wenzu shaved her head in 2018 in protest at the jailing of her husband Wang Quanzhang AFP

The Many Faces of “Non-Release Release” in China

On April 5, Chinese rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, the last lawyer of the group convicted during China’s 2015 infamous “709” crackdown, will be released from prison since his detention in July 2015. He is unlikely to be a free man, however.

I’ve used “Non-Release Release” (NRR) to describe the phenomenon of individual rights activists and lawyers in China often being released from prison into other, nominally “free” forms of what amounts to detention, such as de facto house arrest or enforced return and restriction to their native village. But NRR can also be used for large numbers of ordinary people, such as Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Many Uyghurs and other minorities there have reportedly been released from “re-education center” prisons, only to be forced to work in factories in various places.

NRR is nothing new in China. It came into use as a system at least as early as the Communist Party’s infamous “anti-rightist campaign” of 1957-58 when the government promulgated regulations that formally authorized the notorious, supposedly non-criminal, punishment of “reeducation through labor” (RETL). In providing for eventual release from RETL’s forced labor camps, the regulations permitted the police to keep on the labor camp premises, after their formal release, those prisoners who had no fixed abode, job or family awaiting them.

I knew, for example, an Indonesian Chinese who had studied law in China in the mid-1950s, served briefly as one of the new Soviet-style lawyers that Beijing had introduced during a brief liberalizing experiment, and was then rounded up for RETL in remote Xinjiang in 1958. He was “released’ in 1961 at the end of his three-year sentence but forcibly kept for another two decades at the same isolated work camp where he had been confined, ostensibly because he had no family in China to which to return. Although he was paid slightly more than when detained under RETL, he was actually forced to provide the regime with cheap labor in a part of China where most people did not want to work. Obviously, this arrangement was also a type of stability maintenance, political control.

The  NRR system has evolved continuously, of course, over the years despite the formal termination of RETL in 2013. By then the police had acquired a lot of experience keeping under continuing control people who had been formally released after completing criminal sentences or even after being detained by the criminal process without ever being convicted or after having been “merely” detained under RETL or similar supposedly “non-criminal” sanctions. One could even say that former Party chief and Premier Zhao Ziyang became a victim of NRR, since, after being toppled just before the massacre of June 4, 1989, he was informally but effectively confined outside of prison — in the Party leadership’s comfortable living quarters — for the last 16 years of his life!

In the past decade NRR has been customized to suit the Party’s needs for effectively suppressing human rights lawyers on a more individualized basis than a formal system might allow, and also for a longer time than formal criminal or administrative sanctions might seem suitable. To the public, NRR looks better than sentencing a lawyer to life in prison, but it can nevertheless amount to a more discreet form of stifling someone forever. For example, whatever became of the great, courageous lawyer Gao Zhisheng? While repeatedly subjected to the formal criminal punishment system, his resistance generated periodic bad publicity for the Party and government. Since his last “release”, however, which forced him back to his native village, he has disappeared. Do people still remember him? Many wrongly assume he has happily been “reformed”.

Think blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng, who, after four years in prison, was “released” to his rural farmhouse with a couple of hundred thugs guarding him around the clock until his miraculous 2012  escape to the American embassy.

What will Wang Quanzhang’s “release” on April 5 amount to? It might have been more appropriate to release him on April Fool’s Day!

The Many Forms of Arbitrary Detention in China

By Jerome A. Cohen

Yesterday was International Human Rights Day. As we look back at Beijing’s human rights record this past year, one of the most troubling abuses in China continues to be arbitrary detention (I’ve written about this subject with Yu-Jie Chen, SSRN here).

Rights lawyers are often the target for such abuses. Persisting prominent examples are lawyers WANG Quanzhang and YU Wensheng, who remain in detention. Foreign critics and activists are not spared. YANG Hengjun, for example, a famous Australian-Chinese blogger, has been detained on the charge of espionage since January. Policy experts like Michael Kovrig and business people like Michael Spavor, the two Canadians detained in China after Canada arrested Huawei’s CFO in accordance with the U.S. extradition request, have been in detention for a year. Just to name a few.

The victims often suffer prolonged detention in a non-transparent process. While China’s Criminal Procedure Law provides some legal time limits on holding detained and arrested persons, there are exceptions to these limits that the police and procuracy have the liberty to invoke in practice. For example, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) can approve unlimited extensions of time for a criminal investigation! What is less clear is whether the NPCSC, when approving extensions, is supposed to issue a public notice to this effect as it does with other actions. Has the NPCSC ever done so?

Another technique for exceeding the prescribed criminal procedure time limits is for the police to restart the clock on the ground that investigation of the suspect has revealed the need to investigate another major crime that the suspect may have committed. My impression is that this has frequently been done in practice but with no systematic reporting of such important decisions to the outside world. Papers are processed within the police bureaucracy, and perhaps the procuracy is informed if it has inquired.

If police officials deign to acknowledge inquiries from a defense lawyer or family member, they might well release this often spurious “new crime” rationale for extending the detention time of a suspect whose case has been delayed for political or other meretricious reasons. But there is no way in practice for such a decision to be effectively challenged. When the case finally comes to trial, the rationale for the delayed detention might often be mentioned in the indictment and would be in the appended police documentation of the case and usually mentioned in the account of procedure rendered in the court’s judgment. Yet these are formalities, not protections.

Of course, it is important to bear in mind that in practice people are often detained in the criminal process in blatant disregard of prescribed limits (Think Gui Minhai, the Swedish national who was kidnapped from Thailand and now disappeared in the arms of Mainland police).

Moreover, with the recent introduction of the “supervision commission” process, suspects can be detained for 6 months before a decision is made about whether to turn the victim over to the formal criminal process or some other sanction.

Finally, there are also other supposedly “non-criminal” detention procedures such as those still existing for drug and prostitution offenders. Others are also detained wholly outside the formal criminal process and even outside the formal police short-term administrative detention process that annually punishes many millions of people for up to 15 days in jail. Of the more than one million Chinese Muslims who have been detained in Xinjiang’s re-education camps, only a minority have been detained under formal criminal procedures.

This is not an exhaustive list. The PRC has mastered many forms of arbitrary detention.

Another tale of cruelty: how the Chinese government crushed rights lawyer WANG Quanzhang

By Jerome A. Cohen

The case of human rights lawyer WANG Quanzhang (my Washington Post op-ed) is one more tale of PRC cruelty toward a leading lawyer and his family but deserves special further scrutiny from several points of view.

When finally allowed to see him after more than 1,400 days into his detention, his wife Li Wenzu discovered the reason why the regime delayed so long and resorted to so many ridiculous ploys to deny her and any defense lawyers access to him. Like some other well-known professional colleagues, Wang has been reduced to a vegetable through a combination of tortures, physical and mental, as this brief account makes clear.  

Yet there are still unsolved mysteries about the case that render it unusual among the many similar examples of the crushing of the right to defense in violation of China’s Constitution and legislation and the PRC’s international human rights commitments. Why, contrary to standard practice even in “sensitive” cases, has no court judgment confirming and supposedly explaining his long-delayed conviction and sentence been issued to his wife and the public? Is it yet known when his anticipated prison release will occur? Has he, like others, been forcibly subjected to unnecessary and unwanted “medical” treatment that weakened his extraordinary resolve to resist his lengthy incommunicado interrogation?

What will be the terms of his release? Will it be another illustration of what I have often called the “non-release release” (NRR) because the victim is in effect illegally transferred from one mode of loss of personal freedom to another involving less financial and reputational cost to the regime? So many valiant human rights lawyers have been neutered in one way or other after ostensible “release” from their years of futile resistance to unspeakable forms of detention.

I hope many journalists will pursue these inquiries.  

My Washington Post op-ed on Chinese rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang

By Jerome A. Cohen

I've long sympathized with the plight of Wang Quanzhang and his family, but never seemed to find the right moment among too many sad choices for comment. Here is my op-ed on Wang from today's Washington Post.

Conviction of Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang

By Jerome A. Cohen

Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison for subversion. But, since we have not yet seen the court’s judgment and don’t know the details of his long detention, we cannot be certain what this sentence means.

Wang has been held in pre-trial and post-trial detention since July 2015, and detention time served is usually deducted from the sentence (with one-to-one credit for the days of regular detention and only half a credit for the days during which he was held in “residential surveillance at a designated location” or RSDL). This probably means that Wang can be expected to be released in April 2020 and perhaps even earlier, depending on how long he was confined in RSDL rather than regular criminal detention.  BUT the court may have deviated from the practice of giving credit for time already served prior to sentence, which would mean no release until mid-2023!

In light of the harsh sentences rendered to some other lawyers punished in the 709 crackdown, IF the court has followed the standard sentencing practice, it appears that the Chinese Communist Party/government has gone relatively (and unexpectedly) light on Wang. So many factors go into the sentencing decision. How has he behaved? What shape is he in? Has he made any apparently sincere commitment to abide by the secret promises usually extracted from a convicted person to be a “good boy” upon release? Has the Party decided to look lenient because of the intense world interest, the abusive and unusually lengthy pre-sentence detention Wang suffered and the current widespread international condemnation of China for its abominable misbehavior toward the three Canadians who are being punished in retaliation for Canada’s handling of America’s extradition request of the Huawei executive? 

Pressures on Wang not to appeal must be very great. Some convicted defendants decline to appeal because they know that the appeal process will not result in a favorable outcome and only extends the time they will remain confined in conditions that are often much more uncomfortable than the prison cell that awaits them once the appellate process has run its course. To be sure, we don’t know in what kind of shape Wang is mentally and physically and whether he has been subjected to any of the horrific “medical” treatment designed to break the will of so many political defendants. He may not be in condition to carefully weigh the wisdom of an appeal. If he is still capable of rational decision and retains his courageous determination, he may wish to appeal simply to avoid the inference that he accepts the decision as a correct and just one.

In any event it should be noted that only giving half sentencing credit for time served in RSDL is grossly unfair, since conditions tend to be more coercive than if the suspect is detained in an ordinary jail, even though an ordinary detention cell can be extremely uncomfortable. RSDL is not “house arrest” in one’s own home but in that of the secret police. I think double credit should be given for every day of RSDL until that vile detention practice is abolished, as it should be!!

The Code of Criminal Procedure limits RSDL to a three-month term that can be renewed once. Yet I have long suspected that police have meted out more than the maximum six-months RSDL term on some occasions by purporting to charge the hapless suspect with another “national security” offense that supposedly deserves their investigation. This may have occurred in the Wang case and perhaps the delay in issuing the judgment is related to an attempt to obscure that situation.

Wang Quanzhang, wife and son (Wang Quanxiu via AP)

Human Rights Lawyer Wang Quanzhang's Secret Trial

By Jerome A. Cohen

Wang Quanzhang, who has been detained incommunicado since July 2015, was reportedly tried today in a secret trial that neither his wife nor supporters could attend.

Wang Quanzhang and his wife Li Wenzu, with their child. Credit: Li Wenzu, via Associated Press

I didn’t have the good fortune to know Wang Quanzhang but I know what he stands for and what the public martyrdom that is his trial symbolizes. Wang, of course, represents the best, yet vain, efforts of many valiant Chinese human rights lawyers to establish the rule of law in an increasingly repressive Communist system. Like so many of his colleagues, Wang has been crushed after losing his freedom for more than 1,200 days. The wonder is that it has taken his captors such an impressively long time to prepare the secret trial.

In a year when “justice” has been chosen to be the world’s most prominent word, what we are allowed to know of Wang’s so-called trial is a brief but potent demonstration of “injustice”. Yet Chairman Mao once said that we should never underestimate the educational value of negative examples!

U.S. should impose Magnitsky Act sanctions against China’s human rights violators

Jerome A. Cohen

Amnesty has just issued a plea for urgent action on behalf of what remains of lawyer Jiang Tianyong. Amnesty’s announcement seems understated despite the large cap title. Jiang is exposed to more than the “imminent risk of torture and other ill-treatments”. He has in actuality long been suffering from such abuse that is designed to break him as a person, to destroy him both mentally and physically. And, as we know from many cases including those of Gao Zhisheng and Wang Quanzhang, this calculated campaign to end China’s human rights lawyering seems to be gradually thinning the ranks of human rights lawyers. The many, sometimes bizarre, procedural violations in Jiang’s case are a reminder of the realities of Chinese justice when it comes to those who challenge the regime. His captors should be investigated on charges of what may well amount to “attempted murder”.

I know Jiang but have never cooperated with Wang Quanzhang, whose case appears to be even more outrageous. After three years of absolute silence about Wang’s fate the Party has reportedly decided to finally bring him to “trial” in the near future but his mental and physical condition are both in doubt, and he has not been allowed to retain his own lawyer but must accept a government-selected one.

Despite Chinese Government maneuvers to gain control over the international human rights institutions and the current relative indifference of the U.S. Government to human rights issues, greater efforts must be made to try to stop the PRC campaign against human rights lawyers. One important, if largely symbolic, response would be for the U.S. to impose Magnitsky Act sanctions against those Chinese officials who are directly responsible for executing this notorious campaign, starting at the top of the Communist Party.