A BEIJING-BASED lawyer, illegally detained for 16 hours and badly beaten by public security officials, was awarded more than 3,000 yuan (HK$2,679) compensation in an unprecedented lawsuit.
According to a report in the official Legal Daily yesterday, the Beijing People's Court in Haidian District ruled on Wednesday that Li Qiang, a practising lawyer and a teacher at the Beijing Politics and Legal University, be awarded 3440.30 yuan in damages in his case against the Guizhou Public Security authorities.
The report said Mr Li had been illegally detained for 16 hours when he visited a ''contact person'' in a private apartment in Beijing on May 8, last year.
At around 9 pm, officers who identified themselves as Public Security officials from Guizhou's Junyi County and Beijing Chaoyang District knocked on the door.
They announced that they were there to arrest the ''contact person'', who was not identified in the Legal Daily's report.
But when Mr Li asked the officers where they were going to take the contact person, he was forcibly ushered into a police vehicle and taken away.
The report said the officers took Mr Li to the representative office of the Guizhou Provincial Government in Beijing where he was ''interrogated and badly beaten''.