China sends campaigner Liu Feiyue who ran human rights website to prison for five years
- Liu Feiyue was arrested in 2016 and charged with inciting subversion
- Beijing says campaigners and lawyers it jails are criminals
A Chinese court on Tuesday sentenced the founder of a website that reported on human rights abuses to five years in jail for “inciting subversion” of state power, a verdict criticised by a campaign group as part of an effort to shut down grass-roots political activism.
Liu Feiyue, the founder of Msguancha.com, a news portal that covers government corruption, police abuses and human rights issues, was arrested in 2016 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power”.
The Intermediate People’s Court in Suizhou city, central Hubei province, sentenced Liu to five years in prison and seized more than one million yuan (US$148,326) of his personal assets, the court’s website said.
Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has overseen a drive to stifle activism that challenges the Communist Party.
“I really cannot understand it. All I know is that Liu Feiyue just set up a website for internet users to write about social issues and inequality,” Liu’s mother Ding Qihua, 76, said.
She said the sentence was harsher than feared, given that the family had hoped for leniency by complying fully with the court’s requests.
China rejects criticism of its human rights record, saying it is a country with the rule of law and that incarcerated human rights lawyers and campaigners are criminals.
Hundreds of lawyers have been detained and dozens jailed in a series of arrests collectively known as “709” cases, referring to July 9, 2015, when a countrywide operation rounded up core members of the group.
On Monday, in the last of the “709” cases to go to trial, a court jailed lawyer Wang Quanzhang for 4½ years on charges of subversion.
Beijing has also in recent years repressed grass-roots activism and shut muckraking websites.
“Prosecuting the editor of a human rights website shows just how frightened the Chinese government is about independent reporting of abuses from inside China,” Yaqiu Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher at Human Rights Watch, said.
