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Blind Chinese Activist Gets 4 Years
Chen Guangcheng, shown last year as women describe how family planning officials seized relatives, has been under house arrest or in jail for a year.
(By Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post)
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Hu Jia, an activist and a friend of Gao's who is also under house arrest, said he had learned details of the incident from Gao's sister.
"More than 10 people rushed into Gao's sister's house and put a black hood over Gao's head. So many men surrounded him that she told me, 'I could only see his slippers,' " Hu said.
"The men pushed me onto the sofa and covered my mouth with their hands. They took away my cellphone and my brother's car key. Everything happened in a few minutes. They didn't say a word," Gao's sister said, according to Hu. "The next day police came to my house, returned my mobile and told me two things. One, that the group of people who came over yesterday were from Beijing and, two, not to tell anybody what happened, to pretend I didn't see anything."
Hu said a "psychological war" has been initiated by the party to terrify lawyers and advocates into "behaving."
On Thursday, international rights lawyers condemned the verdict in the Chen case.
"The Communist Party has decided to thumb its nose at the world by allowing this flagrantly unjust conclusion, and Chen will become the poster boy for advertising this," said Jerome Cohen, a professor of Chinese law retained by the New York Times to help defend Zhao Yan, a Beijing-based researcher for the paper who has been charged with leaking state secrets. Zhao was sentenced Friday to three years, including the two years he has already served in a detention house, so he will be released a year from now. The court threw out a charge of leaking state secrets to the foreign media, but found Zhao guilty of fraud in connection with taking $2,500 from a man in Jilin province, in northeast China. Lawyers for Zhao, however, plan to appeal, saying he is innocent of all charges.
"This is a turning point in the harsh crackdown against lawyers and other rights defenders," said Sharon Hom, executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China. "It moves rights defenders into the 'enemy camp,' of Falun Gong activists, Tibetan activists and democracy activists."
Researchers Jin Ling and Jiang Fei contributed to this report.
