Human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng pictured at his home on October 18, 2022. Guillermo Abril
Chinese authorities arrested Yu Wensheng, a well-known human rights lawyer, and his wife Xu Yan on Thursday while they were on their way to a meeting of the European Union delegation in China in Beijing’s diplomatic district. Both had planned to attend a meeting between European officials and Chinese civil society, which took place without them.
This Friday, two other Chinese activists who attended the meeting, Wang Quanzhang, Wang Yu, and his husband Bao Longjun, were placed under house arrest, as several of the activists had denounced via social media the EU delegation, who called their “immediate… and unconditional release”. He has also lodged a protest with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs over what he considers to be “unacceptable treatment”. Wang also confirmed to the newspaper that she and her husband attended the meeting at the European delegation’s headquarters in Beijing and that she has remained at home since this morning. According to the lawyer, up to “eight strong men” prevented both from leaving their homeland “illegally”.
“They take us to the Bajiao Police Station. they forced us [unos policías] get in the car from the subway. They said they would verbally accuse us. It’s embarrassing,” Xu Yan said briefly in a video posted to Twitter, showing her and Yu Wensheng sitting in the back of a moving car. In other pictures Xu released on Thursday afternoon, several plainclothes people, believed to be police officers, can be seen leading them out of subway tunnels, claiming they have been accused of trying to create crime and chaos. There is currently no news on the couple’s whereabouts.
Those arrested had been invited by the EU to meet a European delegation visiting Beijing. The appointment came on the fringes of the official trip by the chief of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who was due to land in China on Thursday. Although Borrell was unable to travel after testing positive for Covid, the European External Action Service team decided to make the appointment with the group of lawyers and human rights activists, all linked to a harsh crackdown carried out in China in 2015, according to diplomatic sources where more than 300 lawyers were arrested.
The new coup comes just days after China on Monday sentenced Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, two prominent civil and political rights lawyers, to 14 and 12 years in prison respectively. Both have been accused of subversion for promoting the New Citizens Movement, a group campaigning for greater political transparency and social justice, and for attending a meeting in Xiamen, in the south of the country, to discuss China’s democratic transition to discuss. The EU had condemned the verdicts.
Yu Wensheng is a leading human rights lawyer who is very critical of the country’s President, Xi Jinping. In March he had just completed a year in freedom after being sentenced to four years in prison and three more years’ deprivation of political rights for “inciting subversion of government”. Yu was arrested in 2018, a day after he published an open letter calling for democratic reforms to the country’s constitution. He was also previously arrested in 2014 for his relationship with the Occupy Hong Kong democracy movement.
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“I don’t regret what I did,” Yu said last October over tea served by his wife at his home, a small impersonal apartment on the outskirts of Beijing, almost in the mountains. The lawyer had dark circles under his eyes and had often touched a sore arm since his arrest in 2014. He said that he spent most of his time without leaving the house, sitting or lying on the living room windowsill and receiving direct sunlight on his body. , something he took as part of his recovery after years locked up and with little natural light. “I’m basically recovered,” he said, “except physically.”
In his report, Yu claimed he suffered extremely harsh treatment during his detention, with interrogations for up to 18 hours a day in a windowless room, sitting on a steel chair. And on the mandate of Xi, who was then in the process of reviving the position at the head of the Chinese Communist Party, he asserted: “In these 10 years, there has been a degeneration of human rights and the rule of law. I just hope it doesn’t get any worse.”
Prior to his detention, Yu tried to sue the Chinese government for serious pollution and endangering public health. He had also defended members of the religious group Falun Gong, which is banned in China, and represented several of the human rights lawyers arrested during the aforementioned 2015 raid held at his home.
Brussels and Beijing resumed dialogue on human rights in February this year, an official channel that had been frozen since 2019. The two blows against dissenters this week come shortly after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s visit to Beijing by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Both leaders said they had raised the always-sensitive issue of human rights in their interviews with the Chinese government and welcomed the resumption of talks.
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