China Slides On Vow To Improve Rights Record

BEIJING — Even to laymen, the charges against Chen Guangcheng seemed outrageous: Blind since childhood, Chen had been under police guard when authorities in China's Shandong province say he destroyed property and organized a mob to disrupt traffic.

Chen's real offense, lawyers and activists said, was upsetting local Communist Party officials. Since 2005, Chen had exposed cases of forced abortions and sterilizations conducted illegally under China's strict family-planning laws and had helped villagers file lawsuits against local officials.

Last week, the irate cadres struck back: A court in Shandong sentenced Chen to more than four years in prison following a trial that Chen's lawyers called a sham.

"The officials felt that Chen had damaged their careers, so they wanted to retaliate," said Xu Zhiyong, a lawyer representing him. "The trial was totally illegal."

The case and a series of other recent detentions and verdicts — including a three-year prison sentence given to New York Times researcher Zhao Yan last week — have raised fears that Beijing has backtracked from commitments to build a rule of law and improve press freedoms, even as pressure mounts to improve conditions before the 2008 Olympics.

"Hopes for establishing a credible legal system and (improving) press freedoms have been dashed by the current wave of arrests, sentencings and repression," said Nicholas Becquelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for non-profit group Human Rights Watch. "It shows that the commitment on paper is not matched on the ground."

Chen's case has attracted particular attention because he had earned wide respect for working within the law on behalf of women forced to undergo late-term abortions, several of them reportedly just days before they were due to deliver.

Under China's family-planning laws, most couples are allowed only one child, though in some areas women are allowed to have another child if their first is a girl.

Beijing maintains that population controls are needed to lift its already 1.3 billion people out of poverty. But it has banned some coercive methods to enforce the rules.

After Chen — who this year earned a place alongside President Hu Jintao on Time magazine's list of the "Top 100 People Who Shape Our World" — raised the issue, authorities in Beijing investigated and concluded that abuses had occurred.

But local and provincial officials began a campaign of intimidation against Chen, putting him under 24-hour surveillance and detaining and beating lawyers and friends who tried to help him, his lawyers said.

On the eve of Chen's trial, his lawyer, Xu was accused of stealing property, beaten and then held by local police for 22 hours. The court appointed new defense lawyers for Chen, but they did not contest the charges or call any witnesses, although hundreds of villagers would have vouched for Chen.

"The trial was a farce," said Jerome Cohen, a law professor at New York University who specializes in China. "It's not worthy of the name trial."

The ruling came just days after police detained Gao Zhisheng, a prominent Chinese activist who had represented politically sensitive defendants including democracy advocates, underground Christians and adherents of Falun Gong, the quasi-religion that Beijing banned in 1999. China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported that Gao had been detained but gave no reasons for the arrest. Chinese lawyers said Gao's whereabouts are unknown.

Lawyers and activists said the cases mark a step backwards for Beijing's efforts to improve rule of law in the country.

Since the 1970s, Beijing has made great progress at building its legal system. The number of Chinese lawyers has grown to 120,000 from less than 10,000 in the early 1980s while the number of laws has surged similarly.

"Today a significant amount of disputes are being handled by the courts and that is a huge improvement," said Jeffrey Prescott, associate director of Yale Law School's China Law Center in Beijing.

If citizens believe that the courts do not dispense justice, however, "they are going to become disillusioned with the rule of law," he added.

Cohen said that imprisoning Chen on "absurd" charges sent a message that rule in China is still by the powerful. "The government has been beating the drums about the new socialist legal system and the importance of not going into the streets and rioting. But when people use the legal system they are often frustrated."

At the same time Chinese and foreign journalists worry that Beijing is manipulating the legal system to restrict press freedoms.

Last Friday, New York Times researcher Zhao Yan, 44, was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of fraud, although the Beijing court dropped a more serious charge of revealing state secrets. Zhao was detained almost two years ago after an article in the Times predicted a transition among the nation's top leaders.

The International Federation of Journalists condemned the ruling as "further evidence of China's steady retreat from press freedom."

According to the group "more than 30" journalists are imprisoned in China while "many more are subject to censorship, attacks and assaults for nothing more than fulfilling their duty to the public's right to know."

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China issued a press release earlier this month [Aug. 8] stating that foreign reporters are frequently detained and Chinese authorities "occasionally use violence against them and their sources."

The Beijing-based group had recorded 72 "incidents of harassment" involving foreign journalists since 2004, the statement said.

"China's controls on foreign media are not in keeping with Beijing's commitment to the International Olympic Committee to allow free coverage, and are an affront to the Olympic spirit," said FCCC President Melinda Liu. "We urge China to quickly adopt the practices of press freedom expected of Olympic hosts."

Journalists in China have been particularly concerned with the recent closed trial of Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong-based correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times newspaper who was detained by Beijing last year on suspicion of espionage.

"Based on available information, the court of public opinion would acquit ... Ching," The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's largest-circulation English-language newspaper, stated in a weekend editorial. But awaiting the outcome of the trial, "the verdicts handed down to Zhao and Chen are far from reassuring," the paper added.

The verdict in Ching's trial is expected soon, Human Rights Watch's Becquelin said.

Beijing has barred most domestic news services from reporting on the trials of Zhao, Ching and Chen and government filtration equipment blocks Internet searches using their names.