MORE THAN 20 of China’s most prominent civil rights lawyers face the possible loss of their right to practise law in what is being seen as official reprisal for their human rights advocacy.
Chinese law requires lawyers and law firms to get their licences renewed every year in a routine procedure, but some lawyers and rights groups say that in recent weeks the Beijing judicial authorities have been trying to pressurise firms not to give them the stamp they need.
As the 20th anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre looms, the lawyers say the heads of legal firms have been warned by judicial officials about possible adverse consequences for their business if they continue to employ lawyers who take up rights cases.
Some of the lawyers targeted have been involved in representing high-profile human rights cases, including victims of the melamine milk-powder scandal and parents of children killed during the Sichuan earthquake, who are seeking a probe into why so many schools collapsed there.
Cheng Hai, who works at the An Hui law firm in Beijing, was recently beaten up for representing members of the banned Falun Gong cult.
“Currently the Beijing Lawyer Association is delaying some firms’ annual evaluation. This procedure is supposed to be done very fast, within an hour.
“Our firm has been waiting for one month. Some firms just handed in their materials, later than we did, and passed the evaluation pretty quickly. I do not know what the result will be for our firm,” said Mr Cheng.
According to the registration procedure, lawyers must present their annual applications prior to the end of the registration period at the end of the month. Lawyers who fail to renew their professional licences are technically disbarred.
“The procedures are first and foremost for money-collecting. Every lawyer needs to pay 2,500 yuan (€262) per year, and every law firm has to pay 10,000 yuan per year to the Beijing Lawyers Association. And next, I think the annual evaluation is a way to put pressure on human right lawyers,” said Jiang Tianyong, who works for Globe-Law Lawyers in Beijing and has defended a number of dissidents and some Tibetan rioters in the wake of last spring’s violent unrest.
“The new ‘Law of the People’s Republic of China on Lawyers’ was introduced last year, but it does not help,” he said.