Chinese human rights lawyer banned from leaving country to study in US ‘because of national security risk’
- Chen Jiangang was stopped at Beijing Airport on Monday en route to take up fellowship funded by the US State Department
A well-known Chinese human rights lawyer was stopped from leaving the country to take up a fellowship funded by the US State Department on national security grounds.
Chen Jiangang – who represented Xie Yang, another prominent rights lawyer detained in a sweeping crackdown in 2015 – said he was stopped at customs in Beijing Airport on Monday.
Chen told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday that he had been informed that the Beijing Public Security Bureau had issued an order saying that he was not allowed to leave China because doing so would “endanger national security”. The officer who stopped him at the airport refused to provide a further explanation.
He was also denied a written notice outlining the reasons for the ban, and said that without this note it would be “useless” to pursue the matter through legal means or ask the authorities to rethink.
In an earlier statement posted on Twitter, he wrote that he had been told “the reasons cannot be explicitly stated; we just can’t let you leave the country”.