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Jerome A. Cohen
Eva Pils

Opinion | A decade after Chinese human rights lawyers Tang Jitian and Liu Wei were disbarred, much has changed – for the worse

  • Despite the coronavirus pandemic, liberal democracies and lawyers around the world must advocate for persecuted human rights lawyers in China, who are subject to arrests, prison sentences, disbarments and enforced disappearances

Reading Time:4 minutes
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Protesters in Hong Kong march to the central government liaison office in Sai Ying Pung on July 9, 2016, on the first anniversary of the mass arrest of human rights lawyers on the mainland. Photo: Dickson Lee
When his licence to practise law was revoked 10 years ago, Tang Jitian was embattled, but far from defeated. The human rights lawyer movement in China, in which he played a central part, presented one of the most meaningful challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism.
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That is why the government has gone all-out to crush it over the past decade. 

Tang, a gifted and dedicated person, started as a successful prosecutor from a rural background in China’s northeastern province of Jilin. He resigned because he could not bear being part of a deeply flawed criminal justice system.

He had been obliged to witness executions – sometimes horribly botched – and was upset by the lack of dignity with which bodies of the executed were treated.

Tang became a lawyer, originally practising in southern China. He was attracted to online reports of a small community of “rights defence” lawyers, many based in Beijing, who resisted abuses of the party-state by challenging prosecutions. He moved to Beijing, befriended those lawyers and began taking on vulnerable and persecuted clients.

As criminal defence lawyers, Tang and others were frequently frustrated by interference from government judicial bureaus, police, party-run lawyers’ associations and other officials.

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