HRW report: control, intimidation and harassment of lawyers in China

Human Rights Watch publicou hai uns días un informe de 146 páxinas sobre China, centrado nas dificultades que encontran no seu traballo os avogados, especialmente cando tratan con casos políticos ou de Direitos Humanos. Estas dificultades van desde a restricción no acceso ós seus defendidos ou ás probas, ata a ameaza, a detención arbitraria e a inhabilitación para o exercicio da avogacía.

O informe leva por título “Walking on Thin Ice”: Control, Intimidation and Harassment of Lawyers in China. Copio un extracto da súa introducción:

[...] Over the past two decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has progressively embraced the rule of law as a key part of its agenda to reform the way the country is governed. Importing entire pieces of Western-style legal institutions, the CCP is in the process of establishing a modern court system, has enacted thousands of laws and regulations, and has established hundreds of law schools to train legal professionals. It has publicized through constant propaganda campaigns the idea that common citizens have basic rights, elevated the concept of the “rule of law” to constitutional status, and recognized the validity of human rights norms with a new constitutional clause stipulating that “the state respects and protect human rights.”

Yet, Chinese lawyers continue to face huge obstacles in defending citizens whose rights have been violated and ordinary criminal suspects. This report shows that lawyers often face violence, intimidation, threats, surveillance, harassment, arbitrary detention, prosecution, and suspension or disbarment from practicing law for pursuing their profession. This is particularly true in politically sensitive cases. Lawyers are often unable to seek redress for these threats and attacks as law enforcement authorities refuse to investigate abuses, creating a climate of lack of accountability for actions against members of the legal profession.

Instances of abuse by the national government or local authorities against lawyers have disproportionately affected lawyers who are part of the weiquan, or “rights protection” movement, a small but influential movement of lawyers, law experts, and activists who try to assert the constitutional and civil rights of the citizenry through litigation and legal activism. Weiquan lawyers represent cases implicating many of the most serious human rights issues that beset China today: farmers whose land has been seized by local officials, urban residents who have been forcibly evicted, residents resettled from dam and reservoir areas, victims of state agents’ or corrupt officials’ abuses of power, victims of torture and ill-treatment, criminal defendants, victims of miscarriage of justice, workers trying to recoup unpaid wages and rural migrants who are denied access to education and healthcare. [...]