China detains 50 human rights lawyers

The Chinese government summoned or detained about 50 human rights lawyers across the country Friday and Saturday, the largest crackdown of its kind in the last decade. By Saturday evening, 28 people had been released, according to Amnesty International.

The crackdown took place after 100 lawyers released a joint statement protesting the disappearance of lawyer Wang Yu. A prominent human rights lawyer in Beijing, Yu went missing late last week, along with her husband, son, and three other lawyers from the Beijing Fengrui law firm where she works. Chinese human rights lawyers defend issues such as housing rights, religious freedom, freedom of speech and press, and environmental damage. Most recently, Fengrui represented a Chinese journalist detained for nine months for helping the German newspaper Die Zeit report on Hong Kong’s umbrella movement.

Friends last heard from Yu at 4 a.m. on July 9 when she sent a message saying someone was trying to pry open her door, according to the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. According to neighbors, between 20 and 30 police officers arrived around that time and left with someone in custody. Her son and husband, who were going on a trip, went missing as well.

After the lawyers released their joint statement Friday, authorities summoned or detained well-known human rights lawyers—including Li Heping, who represented the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng—in areas including Beijing, Guangzhou, Zhejiang, and Gansu. Some had their homes searched, while others simply disappeared. Detainees such as Beijing’s Zhang Kai and Shanghai’s Zhang Xuezhong were later released.

In an article published by the state-run People’s Daily, authorities accused the Fengrui law firm of running a “major criminal gang that organized and planned creating an uproar in more than 40 sensitive cases and that disturbed social order.” It claimed lawyer Zhou Shifeng and his colleagues “staged open defiance inside the courtroom and on the internet, and behind the scenes instructed their key troublemakers to organize petitioners” into protests.

Global Times, another state-run newspaper, ran an editorial blaming social media for the rise of “radical lawyers” and claimed foreign media used the term “lawyers’ disappearance” to “smear China’s judicial system.”

The crackdown reveals the government’s fear of human rights lawyers—a fourth of whom are Christians—as they seek to use the courts to defend civil rights. Eva Pils, a China expert at King’s College in London, told Southern China Morning Post that “since so many lawyers started openly identifying with human rights causes and coordinating their advocacy campaigns, they are one of the closest things China has to a political opposition.”